Today I added two new pirates to the crew section of the Alaska Robotics website. Cristina draws the Guilty Pleasures comic strip which is a semi-fictional semi-autobiographical story and Dani draws Geek Fetish which is a fount of quirky geek art and humor.
Dani Byers
Born and raised in a small fishing village, Byers has always been close to the sea. An incomparable chef and feared knife fighter, her precision and control of a fine tipped blade are next to none. She’s a bit rough and tumble but Dani has a soft spot for lumbering giants.
Cristina Reitz
A beautiful specter of a woman, a skilled dancer, and a feared assassin, Reitz moves like a steady sea breeze. Her origins are largely unknown, a mix of half truths and secrets. Listen carefully and you may hear her dark laughter come across the water on a cold night.
I think the next crew portrait should be a little chimpanzee with an eye patch and a guitar.
YouTube launched a new video player that you can use to embed customized playlists or channels. This seems like a potentially useful tool and I’ve embedded it here to display all of our Alaska Robotics YouTube videos in one player.
The border colors are limited for no real good reason and the sizing is funky (I had to modify the code snippet to fit this page) but it’s a new feature and it will probably improve. Now I just wish the video quality were as good looking as what’s on Crackle and AKRobotics.
If you have a YouTube account and want to create and embed a custom playlist somewhere just visit the my players section of the site.
Lou and Aaron’s film, “Socks,” was featured today in the animation channel on Crackle!
Sony launched Crackle on Monday, a new video sharing site born from the ashes of Grouper and aimed at the minor league filmmaking crowd. They plan to use the site to find and develop talent in addition to creating a more upscale online viewing experience. The place looks nice enough but the flash interface feels a little slow and clunky sometimes. The quality of videos is superb though and many of the tools are well thought out.
It will be interesting to see if people actually migrate over to Crackle looking for better films or if they’re happier rolling around in the shit on YouTube. I have to say the grungy online video giant is growing on me but I’m enticed by the attention Crackle seems to be giving to their filmmakers. They could potentially build a good community around some happy and productive creative types and Sony has deep enough pockets that they can stand to spend money for a year or two while they build up their talent base.
The revenue sharing agreement isn’t too impressive but it’s better than nothing and maybe more notorious filmmakers are getting better deals than our crew. The payoff in our deal ranges from $150 for 50,000 views to $5450 for 5 million views. At best, that works out to well under half a cent per view. I’m not sure if filmmakers are going to see that as a kind gesture or an insult but I guess most of us just want people to watch our films.
YouTube is king for now but I still prefer the lines sketched out by the Participatory Culture Foundation and their Democracy/Miro project. I like the idea of independent producers manning their own tiny web stations and sending feeds out into the world to be picked up by a variety of readers. Broadcast television for the masses. UHF on the internet.
Many thanks to Arlo Midgett who got us mentioned in a Boing Boing post yesterday! Luckily our server didn’t buckle under the traffic spike and the ripples are starting to spread as more blogs are picking up on our proposal to buy back the legislature.
Despite the heavy traffic and linkage there haven’t been major spikes in the feed subscriptions and I can still hear crickets in our forum. We’ll see how the numbers are looking next week but I hope we can get a few more films posted before the end of the month and try to surf this wave a bit.
I only scored a 60% but I can’t argue too much with the constructive criticism and it really inspired me to work towards a more dedicated release schedule. I’ve informally been shooting for Mondays but I think it’s pretty clear that I haven’t been producing that often or consistently. I think by the end of the summer I can get into the right mood for it. I have a few energy draining projects remaining on my desk but I’m trying to elbow out some space to make this comic artist/filmmaker life really work.
These past couple of weeks have been going really well, I feel a little exhausted and very encouraged. I suppose I should brace for the inevitable ten thousand pound anvil up ahead but maybe if I can build up some momentum it will just glance off.
I don’t really know what I’m talking about here but I’m not going to let it slow me down too much. I talked to this guy a few weeks ago who writes software for a living. It’s like the software assistants you can buy to help you play internet poker except his software buys and sells stocks for you.
Makes sense to me, the stock market is kind of like poker. You want whatever edge you can get when making your investments but what happens when everyone is using little stockbots to buy and trade? Does the market become more predictable or less predictable? Does reality matter anymore or will companies just surge and fall as robots pump money in and out of the rolling waves of trade?
When everyone is trading with robots will it be possible to game the system and play the robots to the advantage of a particular business? What if you know what parameters the software looks for when making investments? Can you spin a little robot net and use your startup to capture a huge amount of automatic capital?
I guess I just have a lot of questions about what the robots are going to want from us when they take over the world.
Sarah Asper-Smith and the Molly Whoopie made the front page of the Empire yesterday! The article mentions many of her creative projects and shines a well deserved spolight on all the work she’s been pouring herself into.
We entered the YouTube Sketchies Sketch Comedy Contest with a short film called Nipple Fire. It’s about a musician reluctant to light his nipples on fire. It’s also about how our friends make us do stupid things.. like make movies about Nipple Fire.
I don’t know where ideas like this come from but it was probably inspired by films like Doctrine and Spinal Tap. The crazy thing is how many bored kids are actually lighting their nipples on fire and posting it to youTube. I’ll pretend they’re our loyal followers.
We entered the