Neil Gaiman on piracy

I only recently became aware of Neil Gaiman, but his work is pretty impressive. I've almost finished reading American Gods - it's quite good. Anyway, when I came across this video (on Gizmodo, one of the best blogs out there, imo, and the original source, and a major source for material you'll find here), it immediately caught my eye.

Gaiman offers an interesting take on piracy, essentially making for an argument for how it's managed to actually help him sell more books. That's great, and it's good to see that the shift towards common piracy might be a good thing (at least in some cases).

Not long ago I would have filed this as just another victory for piracy as an institution in general, but now it has me thinking a bit more about thing than it would have in the past. I've been reconsidering my stance on piracy lately, as I try to fit it into my generalized moral framework. It hasn't led into any changes in my actual online behavior yet, but it's on my mind.

Another Sagan vid

This is the second in a series of videos by Reid Gower promoting NASA (and space exploration in general), combining beautiful imagery and voiceovers by carl sagan. Great stuff.



Here's a link to the first one.

Cleaning out my insta...closet?

Instapaper is great - it's a simple tool that let's you save webpages to read later, and I use it all the time. Probably too much, actually It's only serious shortcoming is that your saved articles aren't searchable, but then again the idea is to actually read through the stuff put in there.

Anyway, I'm going to start whittling away at my huge queue and read/watch/whatever the stuff I've saved in there, and I figure the blog is a good way to share stuff that's worth remembering. So I guess expect a lot of random, outdated, but hopefully funny/interesting/noteworthy tidbits.

For starters, here's something from College Humor, the occasionally hilarious, often dumb, but always at least chuckle-provoking purveyor of supposedly college related humor (how's that for a sentence, hm?): "If Everyone Grew Up to Be What They Wanted as Kids".

I'm not sure which one is my favorite...I'm torn between these two:

Jane McGonigal's TED talk

Jane McG is a pretty inspiring character - I wrote about her on Motivate.Play a while back, and I'm in the process of reading her book, Reality is Broken. This talk does a good job of summing up how she thinks games can create positive change in the world. It's awesome stuff, and I really hope it works. And who knows, maybe my research will end up taking me in the same direction she's going someday...

Galactic Timelapse

From Gizmodo:

Alma Timelapse, Atacama Desert from Shannon McDonahue on Vimeo.

New MP post on Killzone 3 and the PlayStation Move

I've got another new post on Motivate.play - read it here.

My Kitty!!!!

I mean, he's pretty damn cute, right?

Jane McG on the Colbert Report

Jane McGonigal is pretty awesome (she designs alternate reality games that are meant to change the real world). She was on Colbert Report last night. Good stuff.

Here's the episode.