Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Here's a magic trick. I can guess how many movies you own, without even knowing you. Ready? The answer: you don't "own" any. But, I can hear you saying, I've got shelves full of movies. DVDs, Blu rays, even couple of boxes of old VHS tapes sitting in the garage. Oh yeah? Well the next time you sit down to watch that old tape of Rocky Horror Picture Show, sit all the way through past the credits until the copyright notice comes up. It will read something like this: COPYRIGHT NOTICE : The copyright proprietors have licensed the material contained in this video-cassette for private and domestic use only and any other use or reproduction in whole or in part including the making of copies of the material or causing it to be transmitted to subscribers to a diffusion service or selling, letting or hire or other-wise dealing with it in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Seems you don't "own" it - you've been granted a license . What's the d...

Perhaps you went to look up something on Wikipedia today, or Google, or any of a number of other sites, only to find them dark. "What the hell is SOPA?" you may be asking. What the hell indeed. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act (HR3261); PIPA is its lesser known bastard sibling: Protect Intellectual Property Act. Both were drafted at the behest of the Big Media cartels who own the rights to most movies, audio recordings, television shows, and print media. Note I did not say they created these things: they merely own the "rights" to them (whatever that means). Because their business model is broken, they've decided to break the Internet. In it's original form, SOPA criminalizes certain web technologies, whether there are legitimate uses or not. It allow the Justice Department to order the takedown of websites, without any type of due process, and make sites criminally liable for user-created content. A Big Company, irked by a website criti...

Now that 2011 has come and gone, I've decided to take some time before heading back to work to come up with some New Year's resolutions for 2012. I've never had much luck in the past with keeping resolutions, so my first resolution is to only resolve to do things that I stand half a chance of achieving. That being said... I resolve to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year. This sounds hard but isn't. What's hard is keeping it off. Amazon's MP3 store has a slew of weigh-loss auto-suggestion audio files which you listen to while going to sleep at night. I managed to lose about 10 pounds before the holidays doing this - time to get back on track. I resolve to paint more. I've got a MFA in painting, and these days I hardly ever pick up a brush. To go along with that... I resolve to clean out my studio and keep it clean . This means getting rid of a ridiculous amount of crap that currently live in my studio. The problem is that I'm a world class pack ...