Drapetomaniac

Creative Commons recently offered catalyst grants to help spur awareness and use of Creative Commons.

Two grants have been proposed from Austin, one studying the music scene and one promoting the literature scene.

You can support either of the projects in the dicusssion part of the page describing the full project.

Mapping Austin’s Music Ecosystem

The following proposes the examination of Creative Commons (CC) licensing and its adoption among musicians in the Austin area, often called the live music capital of the world. The study attempts to answer the following question: What considerations determine whether musicians adopt CC licenses for their work? While there are a handful of related works and case studies that bring to light, “how many use CC licenses”, there remains a considerable gap in volume and quality of content. We propose to expand the research and to examine the local music ecosystem in-depth

Full Description and Discussion

Common Quill

This project would produce a web site hosting CC and public domain fiction allowing derivative works. Inpiduals will be able to borrow a character, place, creature, thing or theme from a story and create a derivative work. You will also be able to view the creative DNA of a work, much like CC Mixter, by seeing where a character or work originated and who has remixed it.

Full Description and Discussion

Booooooom has a couple of images showing simialrities between various animated movies.
http://www.booooooom.com/2010/07/02/artist-oliver-laric/

It’s from the visual essay, here, by Olver Laric.

Besides the awesome footage of various animated films mimicking each other frame for frame to get the ame result from the audience, the essay also discusses general imagery, sculpture and other mediums.  It starts to show how modern images rely on past images to evoke the same  basic response or build on past memories.

Building on the past.

Tonight I take a bus to Houston so that I can bike for two days back to Austin.

Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned from going from zero miles to 150:

• If it keeps raining every time you want to bike or train, ride in the rain. Turns out it’s supposed to rain the weekend of the ride, so at least I have practice now
• If you’ve never used gears on a bike, ask a few people, because you’re probably still using them wrong
• Higher gears means about 20 lower hearts beats per minute and a saved min per mile. After figuring this out, my fear of a heart attack decreased substantially.
• Don’t bike at high speeds with your mouth open unless you don’t have any protein bars handy and need the extra nutrition
• The “old” ladies passing you aren’t illusions, but your youth might be.
• Don’t get discouraged with the big guy in a Santa suit passes you. Especially if you’ve already gone 25 miles and this is his only lap of the day
• Bikers aren’t whiny (Well, many aren’t). You really will be honked at by aggressive drivers who, even if you are nowhere near them and in a bike lane
• When the driver honks at you, both of your heart rates are racing. One from stress, one from exercise. Guess who lives longer?