I’ve been poking about on Amie Street again recently, because I really like their model; music starts out free, and the price rises as it’s popularity does (to a max of 98 cents per track), and the artist gets 70%. Makes it easy to try things out. And MP3s only, so no DRM issues.

So I just bumped into an artist I kinda dig, so I think I’m going to actually try throwing their flash player thingie up here! It’s for Paul Fidalgo and the Conflict of Interest…kind of reminds me of Jonathan Coulton (another awesome Net artist if you’re not familiar). So here goes nothing…the song is he Immediacy of Now (Robot Curiosity Remix), and I’m quite liking it. I went ahead and bought his entire Amie Street collection: 18 songs for I think 2 bucks. Hard to beat.

I’m hardly on the cutting edge with this anymore, but after forgetting about it for several weeks, I’ve gotten around to watching Infest Wisely, and it’s great. An episode a week, and four are available now. It’s…weird. And interesting. And part of the future of media. Thanks to Peter Watts for the reminder to go back and check it out.

UPDATE: An elaboration. I realize this isn’t great in the absolute sense; in comparisons to Heroes, Battlestar Galactica or even old school like X-Files, it’ll be found wanting in both complexity and production values. But it’s great in two ways. First off, they’re playing with concepts that not a lot of people are, and that’s always good. The medium makes it so easy. And more importantly, it’s being made for probably a thousandth or less the cost of the aforementioned shows, and distributed for effectively nothing. The fact that it CAN be made and seen at all is the really great part.

(Oh, and that doesn’t mean I don’t like the story, I do. *sigh* Explanations within explanations…)

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the June 14th episode.

I’m alive! Hope everyone’s well. I talk primarily about machinima, the machinima toolkit that I’m presently investigating (Panda3D), and my decision to put other development-type projects on hold until I get out a machinima demo.

Links:

• Machinima
• Panda3D

Note: I WILL still be podcasting (hopefully more regularly, too!)…I’m just focusing my coding/development energy on my machinima task.

UPDATE: New bonus — trying a play it now button. Let me know how this works for you. (..it appears the flash widget only shows up at my actual webpage, not in the RSS feed)

Click To Play

Factcheck.org has come a long way on the Net since they started their famous website during the runup to the 2004 elections (they’ve actually been around since ’94, but 2003 was really when they started getting traction). It’s one of the best sites there is, in my opinion, for separating fact from fiction on all sides of the political arena. And their latest release, Audacious Ethanol Hopes?, is a great one: The leading three Democratic presidential candidates wax optimistic about ethanol. We provide a reality check.

Don’t get me wrong; neither I nor (AFAICT) FactCheck think working on alternative energy solutions is a bad idea. But it’s always unfortunate when politicians of any stripe shade their comments, avoid the hard questions, and sometimes flat out lie. Thank goodness for folks like FactCheck!

PS: they have both a email list and a RSS feed (this I just discovered…woot!). I heartily recommend picking one.

(Note: this post has languished in my in-process queue for quite a while, and says little that I didn’t just say in a post earlier today. Regardless, I want to put it out there, because I think it’s a topic that can bear a little repetition. And hey…it’s even getting a little traction!)

The Right To Remain Silent: Silence is about the only right the Guantanamo prisoners have left — Recent Supreme Court decisions do nothing but throw salt on the most vicious wound that the United States has self-inflicted after 9/11. Beyond the PATRIOT Act, beyond the security theatre that now entangles our lives , the REAL ID Act, or even the Iraq War itself…what we have done at Guantanamo is unconscionable.

Make what legal argument you want…there is something intuitively wrong with the system when the country known as the greatest bastion of liberty in this world (which I continue to believe we are) holds people incommunicado, without habeas corpus rights, indefinitely, without charging them with a crime, in a legal no-mans-land where they can’t be reached. It’s wrong. If a legal case can be brought that it’s ok, then the law is wrong. We broke something when we lost our minds after 9/11, and we have to work to get it back. We’ve lost our way.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to discover Find Habeas, an ACLU-sponsored blog following the efforts to restore habeas corpus rights to their rightful place here in the US. (and yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. A proud one.) It’s an excellent place to get an overview of the issues, and of the work being done in Congress and elsewhere to draw us back from the dark, strange place we’ve ended up.

I disagree with many things we’ve done in response to September 11th. From early days, however, I’ve thought the Guantanamo prison, the legal contortions invented to justify it, and the attendant damage done to our rights in this country, the notion of what is allowable, and to our standing in the international community have done the most damage. Beyond anything else we’ve done, domestically or internationally, this has hurt our country. This will be judged by history, and not kindly.

(Note: by no means am I justifying or minimizing the invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib abuse, the PATRIOT Act, etc. by making this choice. All horrible; it’s simply a matter of something going on top, though. In addition, I strongly believe that Guantanamo started us down a slippery slope, making tragedies like Abu Ghraib far more likely. That’s why you have to hold the line sometimes.)

I agree with Christy Hardin Smith; we are better than this as a nation. We can fix this. We have to fix this.

A couple of great starter links from Find Habeas:

• Restoration Of Habeas: A Discussion About Who We Ought To Be
• Executive Primacy and Gitmo

Manifesto Games is a very cool indie game publishing site (with a great mission manifes…er, statement) run/owned by Greg Costikyan (yes, the Paranoia RPG Greg). I peruse the site every so often, and tonight I tried out Galcon. I’m playing the free demo (10 days, not 3), and it’s pretty cool! VERY
fast-paced RTS version of UltraCorps, kinda. Well, ok, with only one ship type, and RTS instead of turn-based, it’s not so much like UltraCorps except in my head
(so I guess it is more like Risk) but did I mention it’s FAST-paced?
Worth checking out, IMO.

Wow…somehow, I hadn’t heard about this, but thanks to the Bad Astronomer, I’m back in the loop. Armadillo Aerospace recently (June 2nd) completed a run through of the requirements to win the Lunar Lander Challenge (they didn’t acually win, b/c the challenge is at a set time later this year, but their vehicle performed all the tasks. Pretty good dry run.) There’s a rocking movie available at their site. (AA, btw, is the John Carmack [id software co-founder] nerd space company.)

thanks to the Bad Astronomer for the link!

Maglev is dead — Great post by the Yorkshire Ranter (I just love the name), and he nails home an important truth to boot. Read this part, and laugh out loud like I did: John Waclawsky said that there are two kinds of technology, the kind that provides a direct benefit to the end user, and the kind that’s designed by people who think they can see the future. These, he said, are also known as success and failure..

Outstanding. And a much better explanation that what I normally say; something along the lines of they like it because it’s shiny. But the same meaning underneath. I like new tech as much as anyone (and way more than most), but I’m not a fan of Architecture Astronautics, or complicated for the sake of…well, being complicated. It also explains why tech I don’t like sometimes ends up in the successful pile…sometimes that crap IS actually useful! *grin*

And the maglev point is dead on; it’s totally shiny. Good show, Yorkshire Ranter!

Ok…finally got it set up in DNS: kenkennedy.info is now a redirect to this site. I gave up on getting the .com; I have a namespace collision with a wrestler, no less. *sigh* So either he or squatters seem to have most of the decent permutations; I should have snapped it up when I had a chance years ago. Oh well! kenkennedy.info should work well enough for an easy to remember, less nerdy URL…it’s not like I’m trying to hide anything, though, since it redirects to here. Just another way to find me.