It turns out that there’s not a whole lot to look at in stores right now, but my friend suggested that it’s just the wrong season to be looking for unpoofy dresses. It also turns out that I tried not one, but 2 strapless shiny dresses. It also also turns out that for all my talk of dresses with interesting straps, everything I tried was strapless.
Dress one of the day, seen at virtually every store we hit.
Dress 2, with flash
Dress two, no flash
Dress three made me feel like a table cloth but I can admit that it’s pretty.
Dress 4 was what I though I wanted, but in practice it’s perhaps a little too plain.
Incidentally, I tried this on too but it didn’t seem appropriate. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
This post has nothing to do with any of the previous posts, mostly because that train of thought has been on hold since the end of last semester. The biggest issue these days is the work of Ingmar Bergman (I know, huge jump). Making my sketches public will, theoretically, push me a little harder than any of the other forces in play. So here’s the first image of the morning:
I’m going to keep updating the post as things happen.
UPDATE: Now with German Expressionist influences:
[This is a vectorated Käthe Kollwitz lithograph for that special mix of angst and graphics.]
UPDATE: And here are some DVD cases. The idea here is that each is represented by a symbol that pertains to that film.
AND THE UPDATES KEEP COMING
In this example, I’m trying to use the image from earlier (see first poster) with a Käthe Kollwitz treatment. German Expressionism is good for you!
…The new means of distribution aren’t things we as writers or
singers or whatever (“content providers” UGH ICK GROSS) ought to be
having dumbass discussions about at the level of “shall we? or shall
we not?” Because yes, we shall, and no, we don’t have any choice in
the matter, and yes, actually, it’s all to the good. You can whine
about spilled milk, or about the horse leaving the barn, but these are
negative ways of talking about it. I mean, in a sense, you might as
well ask “how do you feel about people having conversations?” – how I
feel about it is beside the point. The only question that big
corporations ought to be asking themselves are, in this order: one,
how can we do something with this that our customers/audience/whatever
will enjoy, and, two, how can we make money off it so everybody gets
paid and we can keep the ball rolling? For me the sticking point is
mainly the moronic sort of talk that the whole new paradigm inspires
on both sides of the discussion – people thinking of labels as The
People In Suits!! t3h ev1L v1LLa1nz!! and labels imagining that
they’re going to be able to control the marketplace, which is a weird
delusion anyway, because the customer has always controlled the
marketplace. It’s in the nature of marketplaces to be controlled by
customers, unless there’s some heavy monopoly culture, which there
isn’t….
Bottom line is that you can’t tell your audience how to enjoy what
you do; our job as entertainers is just to do what we do as best as we
can, and if there are corporations whose job it is to turn what we do
into money, their job is to do that without being gross and
embarrassing about it, and then to fairly share the profits. As a
rule, the bigger corporations are 0-for-2 on these last couple of
points though.
Today on BoingBoing via Gizmodo, I read an article about Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and the reasons why the purchases you make for an eBook reader are not your own.
In it, the author lists some problems with owning digital media: first that there’s no physical item to exchange for money, and second the first purchase (if you will) may actually only be a licensing transaction, not an ownership transaction. From the quoted legal brief:
[Under the Copyright Act] the first sale doctrine only applies to the “owner” of a copy of a work, so end users who acquire content by license do not enjoy the right to resell their copies. Whether a transaction is a license or a sale is a factual question determined by courts—even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy. However, as more commercial transactions involve the transfer of digital content—particularly commercial software—courts have struggled to consistently make the distinction between license and sale. Software is increasingly transferred with highly restrictive licensing terms, but federal case law has not clearly determined whether these types of transfers are licenses or true sales.
Finally, on the subject of transferring copies (something both technologies restrict):
Another possible complication stems from the inherent difference between transferring an e-book and transferring a hard-copy book. The transfer of a hard-copy book is just that; the physical transfer of one copy. The transfer of an e-book, however, requires the digital recreation or copying of that e-book. Because the first sale doctrine allows transfers of only your particular copy, and not reproductions or recreations, a digital transfer of an e-book is probably impermissible. Thus, users of Kindle and the Sony Reader can only legally transmit works by selling the physical media on which they are stored—be that the e-book readers themselves or the users’ hard drives.
In the end, the argument seems to be that these restrictive licenses are merely the byproduct of technological advancements, and that it will be up to society to decide if this approach is acceptable.
