So this is a new charitable organization called Little Geeks: “Little Geeks is a philanthropic organization and registered Canadian charity that collects, refurbishes and re-distributes donated home computers to children in need.” How about that graphic design - like Toys R’Us on poppers. I feel like Joe Matt must have done the illustrations since no-one has eyeballs. Seriously though, “Little Geeks”? I can’t say I like it.

Though it may seem harsh to take shots at a good-hearted enterprise, I strongly believe that people from the corporate sector, (and take a look at the board of directors if you want to know who’s backing this project) need as much educating about social change as people who barter for used monitors need educating about interest rates and borrowing to save.

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Until I get off (on?) my ass and see some movies, I really should get myself removed from the Film Friday rotation.

For popcorny movies I have a big backlog of last-in-a-series movies to see. Like the most recent Bourne Identity and the most recent Bond. Then there’s the new stuff that I’ve been waiting for, like Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E (hello? Short Circuit? Anyone?).

When I do want to curl up (who am I kidding) lie flat and drooling on the couch at the end of a long day, I put in something short and/or episodic from the private stash.

Recently, that has meant watching my mini-library of Siggraph Animation Theater Program DVDs.
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This is one day late for Wired Wednesday, maybe we can call it post-Thursday? For all you Electro fans out there, check out toneShared, it’s a library of ringtones by Electro artists available for free. Yeah that’s right, dump Rihanna and go for Caribou, or if you’re feeling experimental maybe Chris Herbert?

The Save Our Net coalition and Campaign for Democratic Media are hosting an event this weekend to discuss net neutrality and to strategize ways to prevent the internet from being tightly controlled by telecommunications corps, which are trying to limit what information we can access online.

Steve Anderson, national co-ordinator of the Campaign For Democratic Media, will speak about the issues, including: how these companies have already been caught throttling or slowing internet traffic to businesses and consumers, blocking access to websites that criticized them for doing so, and crippling consumer devices and applications.

Details:
Sunday, June 22
5:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Windward Co-op, 34 Little Norway Crescent Lake-view room (one block west of Queen’s Quay)
BYOB, vegetarian refreshments provided
RSVP: saveournetcanada at gmail.com

Naomi Alderman finds something to love about the new Grand Theft Auto in The Guardian today, debunking claims that it is “horrifically violent, verging on pornographic, and that a majority of the gameplay is taken up with finding creative ways to murder prostitutes.” Her own enjoyment of the game, she says, come from the incredible graphics and the quality of the gameplay.

Okay, fair enough, but the object of the game is still to shoot people and win gang wars, right? I find it hard to fathom why so many intelligent people insist on defending this game, whose major appeal I once heard summarized as, “you can sleep with a prostitute and then shoot her so you don’t have to pay.”

Creative, indeed.

Last week I got a notice from my Rogers, my internet service provider, informing me of changes they’re making to “better serve” my online needs. The big change, of course, is putting a cap on my “usage allowance,” which means they can charge me more for my internet use, depending on how much I download. Bell is also limiting the amount of content Sympatico subscribers can download.

This isn’t just a corporate ploy to get people to pay more for their connections – this is part of a disturbing move by ISPs to change the way the internet works. What we have come to know and depend on as a space for the seemingly-free flow of information, connecting people around the world, is beginning to reflect the stronghold media conglomerates have around other means of communication, including newspapers and broadcasting, which means the kind of content we can access online, just like the kind of content we can access from the mainstream media, will be limited.

(Of course, the internet is not a perfect place: access is limited to those who can afford it, and the most highly-trafficked sites are still those owned by bottom-line driven major corporations. Still, the potential the internet holds for democratizing communication is critical).

This latest move is part of the struggle over neutrality, which has become a big issue for media activists in the United States.

Here in Canada, the Campaign for Democratic Media is leading the charge in trying to stop what they call “the throttling of the Internet and the strangling of our choice.” They argue that internet service providers have the potential to fundamentally change how we are able to use the internet if their efforts at limiting downloads aren’t stopped.

As the Campaign writes in a statement:

Using the… ‘traffic shaping’ principle, the companies can steer subscribers to their own content, or content produced by affiliated companies, and away from that offered by competitors — including the public broadcaster. For example, some Internet users who recently tried to download CBC’s The Next Greatest Prime Minister on Bittorrent were told it would take hours to do so.

Apart from public broadcasters, this could one day have serious implications for alternative and independent media, such as this blog you’re reading.

You can get involved in the campaign here or join the Facebook group here. Also, check out this insightful article on the issue.

…or putting in a little extra.

We all know now that just about any image of a woman on a poster, ad, billboard, or album cover has been (heavily) manipulated. Smoothed and cloned and lifted and trimmed.

But it’s refreshing to know it in a tangible “look at that right there” way as opposed to a more hand-wavy ephemeral way.

To that end, I give you Photoshop Disasters.

It’s a site dedicated to posting and mocking any and all public Photoshop screw-ups. But there are so many reworked images of women to choose from that they currently make up the bulk of the posts. Women remade in the texture of rubber, moded to look like anime, or, more comically, given extra hands:

“Sir Lancelot gazed fondly into the soft blue pools of Lady Guinevere’s eyes and gently held her mutant third hand. Wait, what?”

Yes, this is my third post regarding a movie starring Ellen Page, but stay with me on this.

The Tracey Fragments has a fairly simple premise: take a fifteen-year-old girl who’s tormented at school, shackled with an ineffectual psychiatrist, and living with a family barely held together with emotional duct tape. Then rip the tape off and see what happens. One day, Tracey’s kid brother goes missing, and like all teenagers teetering on the brink of emotional collapse, she takes the one action that makes sense: she runs away from home and towards Winnipeg in the hopes that she’ll find her brother. From that basic foundation, McDonald spins a complex multi-tracked narrative, told largely through an almost-literal kaleidoscope of images that serves as the film’s calling card. Nearly every scene in the film consists of multiple video images, arranged and re-arranged in often-hasty compositions designed to put the viewer inside Tracey’s cluttered, mile-a-minute mind.

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Hey team — inaugural Wired Wednesday post. w00t!

And I’m kicking it off with the hugely sexy topic of… hi-def optical disc formats!

No, come on, it’s gonna be good. I know, I should do all the shiny this week — when robots fall and Rock Band and Google 411 in Canada. And we’ll get there, I promise.

For this week though, we’re going practical. Because there’s nothing more Shameless than walking into a tech store and knowing your stuff.

I figured that if someone reasonably geeky, like myself, used to wonder WTF was the difference between Blu-ray and DVD and HD DVD, someone else was probably wondering too (though possibly with less profanity). And in the interests of spreading tech-savvyness amongst teh ladehs, I’ve written up below the cliffs notes to hi-def discs. What they are. What battle Blu-ray just “won”. And what to do with all your DVDs (<-keep them). Etc.

But first something from xkcd that has absolutely nothing to do with that:

Ahem, so, without further distractions: WTF is Blu-ray

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