Reflected Signal [12 Feb 2004|05:06pm] [ music | The Blueskins - Change My Mind ] Some recent mailings from my email journal, BAD SIGNAL (which you can subscribe to by going here) ### 1.44MB I have hotshit broadband, these days. I can suck 1.44 meg out of a half-decent server like a crack whore de-spunking a virgin businessman. As it were. 1.44 meg is nothing. I can send that anywhere. I can dump it on free webspace without filling anything up, because, hey, it's only 1.44 meg. Back when I was working in web-animation, 1.44 meg was the studio's absolute upper limit of file size for a 3-minute Flash webisode. 1.44 meg is, of course, a floppy disc. I imagine most of us still have floppy disc drives. Even on 56K, 1.44 meg is only a few minutes' worth of download time. http://www.floppyswop.co.uk is an art site with a good idea. Contributions are limited to 1.44 meg. It has to fit on a floppy. Floppies are/were viral. Distributable. With increased speeds, 1.44 meg is also distributable. It's emailable. It's quick to FTP into some webspace. I was reading the LiveJournal of Liz from the band SWARF earlier. She was looking for ideas to promote the band with. And I'm sitting here thinking, with some donated brainpower from someone who knows video and someone who knows Flash, they could put together a one-minute thing with visual and music and it'd come out at 1.44 meg. And they could put it out into the world and say, share it with your friends. Hell, produce a short piece of music. 1.44 meg. And say, there it is, it's under a Creative Commons license, spread it around like the clap. Because people will spread around good stuff for you. Most people get boring email. Most people get shit from Nigeria, and demands that they increase the size of their penis immediately. It's a golden little moment when you get a piece of art, that you've never seen before, that you'd never get from TV or radio, turn up from a trusted friend in your email box. Use http://www.fpdf.org or one of the other free PDF builders, and produce a 1.44 meg poster, handbill, pamphlet, postcard. Stamp the delivery webpage with a 1.44MB logo and link it to this letter as a text file, explaining it all. (Yes, I've been drinking. Shut up or I'll bite out your adrenal glands and chew them up like grass.) Just a thought. ### EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE Received in email from Cory Doctorow today. I read the book last year, and it's really bloody good. Cory is crazy. He wants to give you the book for free. Keep reading. "My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe starts shipping today -- it should be showing up in bookstores any day now. "As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel, I've made the whole text of the novel available as a free download in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license -- and I've written a short essay explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel. "I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it." ### IN VANCOUVER A friend of mine in Vancouver needs to buy or borrow a pair of Spider Jerusalum shades for a photo shoot. Her name's Tristan Risk, and her email is aenslayde@yahoo.com. If someone out there can hook her up, it'd be doing me a favour. Thanks. ### PHRASE OF THE DAY Phrase of the day: "my inner Shatner" ### FINAL THOUGHT OF THE NIGHT Final Thought Of The Night: If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain -- do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set? ###

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