Inflammatory rhetoric! DO NOT WANT!
Kip @ 80: I hope this means Teller's going for Obama.
You owe me a new keyboard.
Cajun, I have indeed been known to go to Uncle Hugo's for a science fiction fix, although it's been a month or three. Also, I used to work at Dreamhaven, and get there sometimes too.
My neck of the woods is Powderhorn Park. Ever go to the May Day parade and celebration?
Joann, I'm not sure what happens if one doesn't have a middle name. I don't know that one's required, but anything's possible. (I don't know what happens if one has more than one middle name, either. I wonder.)
It also occurs to me (right after I hit the post button, of course) that maybe by participating in the process the way I'm doing, I am keeping myself from the worst temptations to either respond to jerkitude in kind, or to be a jerk myself. What I mean to say is this: I'm one hop away from going to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate. (One hop, though two chances to be selected: congressional district convention, and state convention.) Doing my best, there, to carry forward what I feel I have been entrusted with -- well, I think it helps me stay with the bigger goal, and not get into fights that aren't useful, or go off in a pyrotechnic pinwheel of frustration or something.
This coming Saturday is the first of those two chances.
If I go, I'll give you guys whatever eyewitness reports I can. (If I go, I might even find out first-hand whether lip-reading is as useful a skill there as it is on some other occasions. Heh.)
Sarah @ 56: But somewhere near my stomach, I get a huge, painful knot these days at the thought that I might wind up voting for the same guy who, a few months ago, I was considering voting for in the first place. It's the intervening experience of participating in the primary that's done that. It won't change what I do, but it's definitely changed how I feel about doing it.
I don't have the huge painful knot in my stomach about the thought of voting for the candidate I do not currently support -- because I know what I'll do, and I am OK with that. I do have it when I think about interacting with friends and acquaintances who have said and done certain things during the course of the campaigns so far. Mostly, I hope I can just keep a wary amiability going at worst, and be as open-minded as I can. It's going to be a challenge in one or two cases, as I generally respond badly to [specific examples redacted]. But hey, their tempers were high, and the stakes were high, and people do things badly sometimes, and Gawd knows I have done so on occasion, and, well, you know the drill. (I'm talking about people I know, not J. Random Otherguy Supporter, just to be clear.)
I know it isn't reasonable; it's like saying that I was bitten by a German Shepherd once, and now they all make me edgy. I just try to keep it from affecting how I act. Maybe I should have internalized that more and not even brought my story up in this context, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels alienated from the other side, and wonders how the people who have acted as though I'm there enemy will treat me when we all gather under the bigger umbrella.
Mostly what bothers me that I've heard from "the other side" (which is not what I think of it as, but anyhow) -- let's say "the other wing of the party," OK? -- is how they won't BE in that bigger umbrella if things do not go the way they want in terms of nominee selection. I hope that's just one more of those things said in the heat of a flash-point moment which is not meant to be a final answer.
I'm going to take it bit by bit, and work for the best. I figure I'd be pretty amiable about meeting you in that tent. Dunno if that helps, but there it is.
I'm sorry people have been being jerks about this stuff to you.
albatross @ 203: I suspect the Minnesota albatross I know is pretty cold-adapted, so very likely. Your albatross may vary, of course.
Yup, that was the book. It was when the then-new edition came out in hardcover... dang. Can't remember, exactly. But yes, I think it was still at the Fairmont. And I did indeed go to an IBM gala, at that museum in Golden Gate Park or some such. I remember the joke associated with that. (Q: How can you tell this is an IBM function? A: Big dead dinosaur out front.) Dunno if it was the same one you recall; I didn't see an IBM ice logo. I did see eight rooms with different cuisines, some fire-eaters, a cigar bar that a bunch of us female types took over at one point, and several rooms with live music. And the inexhaustible towers of shrimp, which weren't as good as the room full of sushi, if I recall correctly. An ice sculpture could have been easily overlooked in all that.
If DHS has bags, I would carry Beyond Fear in one. I used to carry my embroidery project around in the NSA one until it tattered beyond use.
TexAnne: best of luck with moonlit employment, and may many fine things come to you.
cajun @ 605: Also an Illinois driver's license is apparently insufficient proof of ID in Minnesota.
I'm sorry my state's bureaucracy is being extremely annoying to your mother-in-law. Is it that her valid Illinois drivers' license has a name other than her current legal one, or something?
Usually getting a MN drivers' license is just a written test and a vision test, if you have a valid license from another state plus ID*.
Sometimes there's not even a written test. However, if the other license is not current, then there's probably a road test involved.
If it's any help, our idiocy is not xenophobic, but extends to our own: I was told by someone of a circumstance in which a Minnesota driver's licence was an insufficient proof of ID in Minnesota in the very building where the license was issued. (I forget the very convoluted tale, but for the friend it happened to, it was Dire.)
* One primary form of ID and one secondary form required, and as they say, "the primary document must contain your full legal name (first, middle, and last) and the month, day, and year of your birth." A valid passport is primary ID, just like a birth certificate or tribal ID card or military ID card or a few other things. Her Illinois drivers licence, as long as it's not expired more than five years ago, should count for secondary ID, according to the MN DMV website, provided it has her legal name on it. Marriage certificates are listed as secondary documents, so there wouldn't be an advantage to fishing that out rather than using the IL license, unless there's a name discrepancy on the IL one -- which it sounds like there is, from what you said. Social security card is a valid secondary ID, too.
http://www.dmv.org/mn-minnesota/apply-license.php#New_Residents
Sorry, albatross; I thought you were the Minneapolis albatross, rather than a different bird. (Though perhaps we did meet at RSA, albeit it would have to have been the last one on Nob Hill, where I was a booth weasel for Bruce Schneier. There's something about the sight of a copy of Advanced Crypto in an NSA shopping bag* that still gives me the giggles.)
And I admit to palming a card there, a bit. The reason for going to caps was not entirely cosmetic. There were a number of fillings in my front teeth that were due for replacement (yes, it says something that I didn't know that fillings wear out eventually), and for the first time in my life, I was covered by dental insurance. My dentist and I discussed how many times it would be likely that those fillings would need replacing, based on assumptions about life span, and decided that capping the whole front range was worth considering. So we did.
(My grandmother, who died last year, used to ask me to come over by her at every family gathering, saying, "Smile for me! Isn't that something? You bought rich people's teeth!" It tickled her beyond words that somebody in her family had edited the family class marker, and gotten rid of the biggest clue, the one that is visible even before any words come out. She knew the value of "cleaning up good," and the uses of it.)
* We didn't have bags. If someone requested one, I apologized and pointed out that the NSA table next to ours had lovely ones.
CHip @ 179: albatross: even granting that the story line recently finished in Doc Rat doesn't apply to humans, ISTR that there are mechanical reasons for wanting fully-opposed teeth; filling in gaps is not just cosmetic. OTOH, if you want to snark at cosmetic capping you'll get no disagreement from me.
Well, both of you guys can snark at me then.
Go on. I'm waiting.
(Upon rereading, it doesn't look like albatross was snarking. If snarking was intended, albatross does know where to find me in person, so that can be attempted efficiently. Juan would probably appreciate warning so that he can make popcorn.)
After you're done snarking, I can tell you about a completely unexpected result: how happy it made my grandmother, and NOT for any reason anybody is likely to guess, either.
OK, snark on, guys.
Teresa @#64: That really is a great video. Way to keep his cool.
I am sending this to a tester friend immediately. Nicely done.
I think the invasive jerkiness in the original post was that of the security guard who stopped Patrick from photographing and threatened to (and attempted to, actually, what with the reaching for his camera) destroy the photograph. We ran rather aground on a digression of what possible reasons for not wanting to be photographed some of the vendors might have, but in fact it was not a vendor objecting at all, from the story. It was an officious security guard taking it upon himself to stop the heinous threat of Patrick photographing the ceiling.
Simon @133: yeah, that'd piss me off too. Photography is one of those easier-to-rip-off things, and the opportunists strike there harder.
A while ago, I bought some beads from a supplier in New York I like very much. When I returned to where I was staying, I dumped the beads out to do the ritual post-purchase gloating, and the business card they had given me flipped over. The photo on the other side looked very familiar. It took me a minute to realize that they had lifted a photo of my jewelry taken by David Dyer-Bennet and used it without permission on their corporate business cards.
We went through various discussions about this, as you might imagine. They wound up never paying DDB anything, but they did reprint all their business cards, apparently, because the new ones don't have that photo on them. (It's possible DDB may still pursue the matter with them, as they definitely infringed his copyright, and did so for commercial use.)
Me, I'm glad they stopped using it without permission, because I like buying their beads, which are pretty cool, and I like them. For the record, the person at this particular shop, which may or may not be their only one (I dont' know, actually), said that they hired somebody to do the cards, and that they were not aware of the infringement. They were rather taken aback by the whole thing -- as was I. I mean, what are the odds that I'd walk in, buy some wholesale beads, and then find a photograph of a necklace I made adorning their business card?
(It was the one called Oh, That Kind of Angel. DDB gave it to Lydy as a present, years ago. Somewhere there are some very cool photos of her opening the box and being totally surprised and delighted and speechless.)
However, they didn't do it by taking a photograph in a public market.
Thanks, Sam. After Patrick pointed out the particle trail similarity, the name the piece needed was pretty obvious.
To the fretful artisans here:
If what you're worried about as an artist is people copying a copyrighted design, that's something with a set of remedial actions already in place.
If you're worried that somebody's going to steal a march on you and make a bunch of your nifty new thingies and sell them before you get a chance to do so, then relax: it'll either happen or it won't, but fretting about it will be bad for you, that I do know for sure. And besides, all things that get popularized generate copies and spin-offs. It's how this stuff works. Did you get any of your ideas from seeing somebody else's stuff?
If you're worried about the person who will take a photograph and therefore not buy the piece, well, that happens. In that case, let 'em get on with it and take their photo and move on, and let the people who actually like the work and might want to live with it come in. That's how I feel.
PNH @161 We're talking about public policy: not whether it's reasonable for artisans to prefer that their work not be photographed, but rather, whether those artisans can reasonably expect the organs of the public sphere (police, private security hired out of public funds, etc) to cooperate in enforcing those preferences.
Oh! Right. (I was answering a different question, I think. Oops.) No, definitely not. Public is public, and that goes for photography, in my book.
(If we did get to have police or private security do that sort of thing, then I have a short list of annoying people I'd have them keep away from me just for my own satisfaction. And they'd make me tea. And massage my feet. Heh.)
I should add that I may be in a special position. The best market for my work is people who work with or love words, possibly because of the Artists' Challenge program. An out-of-date and thus incomplete list is here. Nowadays, there are at least six times that many, plus hundreds of haiku earring poems.) So the average craft fair is not my market. I have done them; my sales are not nearly as good there as they are at a convention with a large number of writers, editors, agents, and other story-lovers, or on-line in similar venues or communities.
If I were just making shinies, cranking them out, I might feel differently. But as it is, each piece is different, and each one has only a few people in the audience who will love it and jump on it and take it home. (This makes them unattractive for mass-marketing and piracy, most likely.) But for a unique piece, it only takes one. The trade-off for me is being able to wait until that piece finds its person. These days, though, it works pretty well; I'm at the point where I can't make pieces fast enough to keep enough inventory in stock for the next show.
Right. Workbench. That's what I was going to do. See ya.
Oh, hey, a topic I actually know something about! As a craftswoman/artist/maker-of-stuff who does this as her day job (celebrating ten years of metal-bending and shiny-making this June: come to the party at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention!), I'm qualified to speak about the no-photography issue.
While some crafters/artists (and some public craft shows) do discourage or prohibit photography, many do not. I'm one of the latter group... and I'm pretty sure that my work is "sufficiently unusual" to meet the criteria of having that as a reason to fear photography, if I were of that mind. (Example: when I was last in New York, I did a piece that PNH told me looked like particle trails; it's this one: The Moving Particle Writes.)
Instead, I'm fine with people photographing the pieces*. I'm fine with people asking a question or two about technique, too. More than five or six questions, though, and I sometimes smile and explain to them that I do teach, and that I do it on a sliding fee scale. That's because usually at a show I am there to sell and to make stuff, rather than to teach, and since I lip-read, teaching does take rather more energy and attention than an average show permits -- though I did just spend some serious time at Potlatch with a student by my side, and I think it was interesting for folks to watch. I do often work right at my table, since it's a definite point of interest, as well as a smart sales technique**.
The heart of your issue, though, when you talk about photography is about copying -- and specifically, it's about the dangers of cut-rate copying that would undercut my prices and steal my share of the market. In the kind of work I do, in order to copy my designs a person would have to spend time getting the technique down, and then they'd have to spend pretty much as much time as I do making each piece. (My work isn't readily adaptable to stamping or casting, which are the primary means of quickly mass-producing jewelry. I'm working with what I call "live curves," i.e. hand-formed without tools, rather than jig-formed, and playing with the springiness of the wire and the way work-hardening it gives curves that I suspect are chock-full of nummy Fibonacci series goodness, because they look like botanical forms to me.) I don't prohibit photography at all. In fact, I put photos of my own stuff up on the net all the time.
Sam says in #152, "One thing I've noticed, which might be related or might not, is that there seems to be a fairly sharp divide between people who'll chat at length about their techniques and practices, and people who want to keep them to themselves or just don't like talking about their work. I'm about seven thousand times more likely to buy something from the first kind, but I might be atypical there." Sam, if my experience is anything to go by, you're not atypical. I find that to be true too, and have noticed that shopping decisions do often seem to follow along those lines. Nobody likes to buy from a defensive, suspicious grump.
Another reason I make photographs available and teach is that when I was starting out, I tried and tried to find people working with live curves and doing the same kind of wire-working in silver, gold filled, or (soon!) in argentium that I'm doing, and there just weren't any I could locate. So I started teaching, because if there isn't a sufficient number of artists working in this technique, where are I going to learn about cool new tricks and adaptations? Right now, I have one apprentice who's an adult (and pretty much totally self-propelled; she might well have come up with this stuff herself if she hadn't seen me doing it) and one who's a teenager, and I've taught a bunch of folks in various countries. Then again, my craft is one that takes time and effort for each piece. There are no "secrets" to give away, though there are definitely a bunch of "aha!" moments for students. (Mostly these are things that they have to learn in muscle memory, things that can't be described in just words.) But what they do will be their work; when you get right down to it, nobody can really copy mine without being me, and even I don't do mass-production of any one design. Uniqueness is a plus, in what I do. (It works, too. I just sold over $3600 of work on-line... using photographs.)
Sorry; I can get pretty long-winded talking about work, because I love it so much. I guess the summary is that I personally don't mind at all having my work photographed, though I do enjoy it when people politely ask if they may photograph my shinies. (That's possibly just because I like saying yes. It's a Thing for me. Heh.) The more people like to look at my work, and take photographs of it, and show it to other people, the more I sell, and the more interesting conversations I get into with people who like the work, or who are doing similar stuff or would like to learn how. Being afraid of having my designs stolen? Never really occurs to me, these days. I'm too busy having fun and figuring out the next thing, or refining the one I'm currently obsessed with. But then, I love my work, and part of that love is the love of sharing it. Also, my work doesn't depend on novelty for its saleability. It depends on whether the buyer likes what I've done with that one particular stone bead in that unique piece. (I did do two matching pieces once. They were for two sisters, and I did one in yellow metal and one in white. Other than that, I almost never repeat, except for my "Mary Pinckney's Flowers" earring design.)
Other crafters can prohibit photography if they want. Me, I go the opposite direction: you want to show somebody my work? You want to have a visual memory of something neat you saw somebody making, when you were on your trip? Cool! Go for it.
Hope that helps. I've got to get to the workbench now, because all this talking has made me need to make something.
* as long as they're not blocking access for anybody shopping and buying.
** People are often shy about shopping when the creator of the work is watching them. They're sometimes afraid that if they don't want to buy a piece, the maker will feel hurt or rejected. Or else they just don't like feeling watched while they shop. I understand this completely, so I often bring work to occupy myself with, and thereby take the intensity of my regard off the people and put it on something artistic. Curiously enough, this boosts sales, as people turn out to be more likely to buy something they've seen made. Kinda neat, actually. It's not an automatic sale, but it's a bonus for the kind of person who likes knowing that a real person made something by hand, and likes being able to say that they saw it being made.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 59 |
| 2007 | 97 |
Total: 156 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by elise:
Show all comments by elise.