The other day I observed that, following a reformat and upgrade of Yggdrasil Mark II about a year ago, I still hadn’t transferred my old away messages onto my IM programme. For as long as I can remember being on IM software that let you set custom away messages — I want to say back when I used ICQ you could only select from one of a handful of preset messages — I kept a list of different away messages based on song lyrics or…
Although the ten-year anniversary of the .org won’t come for another four months, in a lot of ways today is the anniversary of the start of what led to the .org. It was on this day in 2000 that I first began The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The life lessons I learned from it really got to me, and made me realize that I wasn’t happy with how my personal or artistic lives were going. Within four months I’d abandoned several projects I was…
Video Games Can Never Be Art (rogertebert.suntimes.com) The first comment Ebert got in response to this article pretty much says just that, and in a lot of ways that may be all that really needs to be said about it. However, I’ve had such a strong reaction to this piece over the past few days that I can’t let it go at just that. As an artist, and as someone who used to play video games a lot (not so much these days because of…
Feinstein joins Senate majority in excluding arts from stimulus package (Mike Boehm/Los Angeles Times blogs) I’m not sure I quite believe that we are already in the worst financial crisis in my lifetime, but if we aren’t there yet, we’re damn close to it. At times like this it becomes hard for artists like myself to push for increased arts funding, especially those of us who live in the part of the country getting hammered the most by the collapse of the automobile industry. People…