Serious Parental Responsibility
Posted by GZ in Inspiration, Life on January 31, 2011
Are you sharing art with your kids? Arts education is one of the best investments we can make in our children’s future – program after program and study after study show the benefits. Conservative forces in Congress and their constituents engaged in culture warfare will keep trying to kill funding for the arts, but it won’t happen if we don’t allow it.
Regardless of political theater and the shifting fortunes of public media, this is something you need to take into your own hands. You can’t just hope they’ll pick this stuff up on their own. There’s an art museum near you, and a children’s theater series. Your local library has a whole section for you. A world of art is open to you in the the biggest library ever conceived, the Internet – Kids.gov will get you started. Take advantage of the annual Free Museum Day, as well as free museum days year-round. Take your kids (and their friends), and show your enthusiasm. Make it real for them.
If you, as a parent, aren’t exposing your kids to art – visual art, music, literature, whatever – you’re guilty of a form of neglect. It’s child abuse, really. You’re stunting their development, and leaving them less-able to cope in a world where cultural literacy actually is as important as those flaming Liberals said it would be.
Brew On
Posted by GZ in Hobbies, Inspiration, Life on January 19, 2011
No, I don’t need another expensive, complicated pastime that requires a lot of equipment, mixing things, and having to wait to enjoy the results. My friend Kip’s all about that, though, so through him I can enjoy a taste of something new without taking on a new hobby/obsession/money pit of my own.
Speaking of tasting something new, Kip makes good beer – really, really good beer. He’s been doing it for a couple of years now, and his results continue to improve. As he’s produced batch after batch – close to 50 at this point – he’s acquired the skills, tools and confidence to design his own brew recipes and submit them for competition judging. He and his brewing/business partner John have progressed to the point where they’re winning awards in regional competitions and are poised for broader acclaim. They’re cooking up a business plan now, and will soon make the leap from home-brew to nano-brewery pro.
I find a lot of parallels between the brewers and the shooters (especially analog folk). There’s the craft and hand-made angle, the chemistry and alchemy, controversy over style and lots of gear talk and envy. Both crowds get enjoyment out of doing the work, but whether a golden pint in a glass or a well-captured shot behind glass, it’s most meaningful when the results are shared.
My friend Mark and I got to pitch in over the weekend on a new brew (a full-grain rye IPA, spiced with fresh Cascade hops), and I’m grateful for the chance to help. I took away a load of inspiration from the process. I can’t describe the experience as heartily as Kip can, so hop over to bierkast.com for the tale of the Rusty Rocket. It’s about half-way down the entry, alongside some snapshots I managed during the steps.
Thanks, Kip. I hope to help out again soon. Brew on!
And We’ll Take a Cup o’ Kindness Yet
Quite a year, everyone – not all good, but decent on balance.
Here’s to a kinder, more consistent 2011. There’s a lot to be done.
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and days of old lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup!
and surely I’ll buy mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
I’ll stumble, and I’ll fall, but I’m going to keep trying. Happy new year.
Build Yourself a Happy Holiday
The image above is from our yearly custom holiday card. We share or trade off design responsibilities each year – past efforts have included hanging paper ornaments assembled from hundreds of die-cut parts and a Photoshopped re-imagining of our cat and guinea pig pets as reindeer-antlered beasts. Adam’s newer to the game and has been the driving force behind the last two. A committed Legophile, he was pretty set on this one, and I did my best to execute his vision. The inside reads “Build Yourself a Happy Holiday!”.
As 2010 draws to a close, I want to wish everyone a happy set of holidays. If your year was great, I hope the next at least matches it, and if not, you probably deserve a better one to come. I know mine will be interesting at the very least.
In Review (Pummeled)
Three years. 736 photos. One minute and forty-six seconds.
This is my photographic life (most of it, anyway) condensed into a rapid-fire video by Pummelvision, a project from the founder of video service Vimeo. It can pull photos from Flickr, Facebook or Tumblr. It’s free – give it a try.
Ricochet
Posted by GZ in herenow, Media, Small Arts Media on December 5, 2010
Well, the Kickstarter plan didn’t quite do the trick. I know I could have made more effort by way of promotion, but life being what it is, I did what I could. I worked some social media angles, setting up a Twitter account and a Facebook page for the magazine (140 ‘likes’ to date) and the project garnered $280 in pledges toward its $1300 goal before stagnating and expiring. The magazine is going to get done – I’ve talked about it too much, to too many people, to let it slide.
In the process of researching the publishing side of the equation, I figured out a few things:
- Digital publishing-as-revenue generator is not nearly as advanced as I had assumed. Since I’d like to make a little money from this, both to cover expenses and to pay contributors, it’s something I need to work out. There are plenty of ways to give your work away, but few to sell it. As big a sensation as digital magazine publishing “for devices” (Kindle, iPhone, iPad, etc.) has potential to become, it’s got a way to go before it catches fire.
- For the type of thing I want to publish – a words-and-pictures magazine that hangs together as a single piece – PDF is still the way to go. Amazon’s DTP for the Kindle and EPUB (the standard Apple’s using for its e-books) don’t respect the formatting of pages in the way the you’d expect of a magazine. I may consider them for other projects down the line.
- Considering PDF as the medium, it’s fairly easy to get an issue up on the Web for people to view for free, and maybe even buy. If you want to fold in things like DRM, subscription services and the like, you’re paying real money. Getting the same content onto iPad screens is even weightier, requiring the development of a reader application and dealing with the Apple App Store obstacle course.
- This is not a business opportunity that’s open to the little guy. The tools to do this are not available as simple extensions to Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. Adobe, in particular, holds the keys to make this accessible, but they’ve gone the “platform” route with a service that’s aimed directly at large publishers desperate to start picking up digital channel revenue to bolster weakening paper sales. Apple could jump in and save things for small publishers, but there’s no evidence they will.
- Unless I want to build my own e-reader app (I don’t) and my own back-end to handle the sales bits (I can’t), I have to partner up with a company already doing these things. I talked to Woodwing, Adobe and YUDU, each of which has a platform built-out for the end-to-end publishing and sales process. Each boasts their own marquee magazine clientele (Wired, Time, Martha Stewart Living, etc.) and each carries a entry price reflective of that fact.
With that in mind, I believe:
- The iPad and similar devices are credible platforms for presenting and consuming digital magazine content, and especially pieces featuring photography and video.
- This point in time represents a “ground floor” for handheld device-based consumption of magazines and magazine-like media.
- It’s going to be a while before the channels for delivering content to these devices is opened up to everyone at a manageable price.
- If I’m looking at this brick wall, there must be other small publishers doing the same.
So, I’m launching a new venture which I’m tentatively calling Small Arts Media. It will be the home of herenow Magazine and some other projects I have in mind, but it will also become the digital publisher of small, independent creative journals, opening the doors to as many content creators as I can convince to come aboard.
I’ve signed on with YUDU Media, a UK company specializing in digital publishing on the Web and iPad, and commissioned an iPad application which will serve as a “newsstand” through which any number of digital magazine editions can be sold and read. They provide a robust back-end to deal with sales and subscription management, and will handle all of the gyrations necessary to get things into Apple’s store. The plan is to launch that in January or February, with the first issue of herenow and possibly a few other titles.
I’ll be working this week to get some sort of prospectus out to potential partner/clients, as well as putting together the under-structure of a little company to support everything. I’m probably biting off a lot more than I should, but it feels like a need that I have and a good opportunity coinciding. It’s time to do this.
I’ll post progress here.
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