So yesterday afternoon on Twitter, I noticed a lot of my art friends talking about Pinterest with the hashtag #donotpin. I had no idea what they were talking about so someone linked me to this article.

The debate is whether or not Pinterest (and Tumblr) hurts artists by people not attributing images or linking them to their source blogs when they are pinned and my answer to that is a resounding “YES” and I’ll explain why by posting what I posted on Facebook last night about it, in response to Less Herger’s blog post about it:

You guys should read the article on Pinterest she links though. It’s not as cut & dry as it seems in the case of Pinterest. I don’t use or know much about Tumblr so I can’t really comment on that but Pinterest is a cesspool of unattributed things. The problem with Pinterest is that people are legitimately too stupid to know how to attribute things correctly by pinning the direct source. Pinterest should do more to ensure that its userbase knows how to do this CORRECTLY, like maybe having an etiquette section in the FAQs and a link on each pin to report it for copyright violation. The other thing is that Pinterest saves a copy of the pinned image, which is dirty pool. Like the blog post I linked quoted (from the blog posts SHE linked, which I also posted this afternoon on my own FB), Pinterest creates a duplicate, competing image, which is counterproductive to the original artist. 

That said, this image here is a prime example of where I saw an image on Pinterest, unattributed, and I moved heaven and Earth trying to find the original artist so I could buy a print:
http://oiseauxnoir.bigcartel.com/product/shine-print

If it had been pinned properly, I wouldn’t have had to spent a very long day trying to find the original artist but what was WORSE is that what was pinned? Was a VERY high resolution picture of the piece. I don’t know where it originated from but it was likely the artist’s original scan. I saved the image and if I was a dick, which let’s face it, most people are, I could either print my own copy (if I had a nicer printer) or take it to a print shop to get a print of my own for like, $5, which is a very real scenario when no one has any idea if a “real” artist did it or some bored housewife in Idaho (not that that should make a difference but it does).

I like Pinterest. A lot. But I also pin things correctly by attributing them to something’s original source and when I repin things from other people, I make sure they’re attributed correctly as well, but most people on there are NOT that contentious. My mother has been ripped off a few times now by people repinning her things under categories like “DIY” when it’s her original work (this is not copyright infringement but it is damaging when they pin the image and not her original source or when they take her name off their repin).

This hasn’t happened to me yet and to be honest I wouldn’t mind so much if it DID happen to me because I don’t post high-res images and I know that no one could ever recreate in a print what I do in an original but it would hurt my feelings to see a pin, one day, where I wasn’t attributed by proper pinning when I make it so easy for them to do.

Pinterest really needs to take a long look at how they do things. There’s no reason for them to keep a copy of each image and if they insist on doing that, they could at least make it a thumbnail or a smaller image so it’s not competing with the original.

So there ya have it. My $0.02 on the subject.

When I woke up this morning and looked at Twitter, an artist I’m not familiar with had posted a pledge for people to take and while I won’t be taking the pledge, as its worded (I’m not going back through all my boards and seeing if they’re attributed correctly but I will make sure they are from now on) but I agree with the sentiment.

The thing is, the arts communities shouldn’t be the ones doing this. It shouldn’t be up to us to police everyone else or to set Pinterest community guidelines.  That’s Pinterest’s job and they’ve really dropped the ball. If you read the blog posts linked, especially the first one, you’ll see that their terms of use are pretty flimsy. You’re only *supposed* to pin things you own the copyright to but 99% of users are not doing that and Pinterest knows this. And they don’t do anything about it. Because that would kill the whole site if they did.

So there needs to be compromise and I think we, the arts community, need to collectively come up with that compromise, develop a petition and take it to Pinterest directly saying that things need to change. This is probably one of the only instances where a petition may do some good. We could PIN the petition and ideally, it would be repinned over and over again, especially if it’s made cute somehow.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. Y’know? So nothing’s going to change if all we do is hand-wring and write angry blog posts. I saw some people deleting their Pinterest accounts in protest but really, that’s just a drop of water in a very full bucket. That’s not going to make a difference for me or anyone else, that’s only going to make a difference for you, it’s going to help YOU sleep better at night…I guess. But what if we could really enable change? What if?

Pinterest is a great service. I love the site. And it could be really useful to artists and bloggers (or artists who blog!) as far as exposure so why not help create this tool while it’s still in its infant stages? I mean, you still need an invite to even use Pinterest! It’s still in Beta! NOW is the time to voice our concerns to affect change! So why aren’t we doing it?

Discuss.

Edit: This works too! PIN PIN PIN!

A few days ago, my friend Joey Michaels wrote a post about E/N which brought back a flood of memories for those of us who were involved in it back then and then Artfag made a top secret, invite-only Facebook group where all of us old-timers have been catching up and remembering old times.

It’s so funny to think about how little has really changed for me. Out of all 80 of us, or at least the ones who have been participating, I’m the only one who’s really still blogging the same way I did back in 2000. Every single day. I’m still on Camwhores (formerly portal 9), where I’ve been since mid-2001. I still post in the E/N style, I think. On both sites.

I dunno, I just never really thought about it before today, that things never really changed for me. Everyone else is off doing grown up things and talking about “the good ol’ days” and I feel like I’m still pretty much living them. It’s never really occurred to me until today that most of the people reading this post have no idea what the E/N scene was, let alone were they a part of it. People rarely believe me when I tell that that I started blogging, like for real, before the word “blog” even existed.

Back then, camgirls were smart as well as beautiful (not saying they aren’t now, necessarily, some are, but in a totally different way) and most of them were super geeks who coded their own websites by hand. I didn’t though, I used Dreamweaver which was notorious for writing sloppy code so even though I used it, I would have to often go into html mode and fix the code by hand, so I consider it a half & half thing for me.  This is an image of the main page of the last layout (I think) I coded and created by hand. I was so damn proud of it:

If you’ve never read my “About the Site” page and are curious about my site’s history, you should check it out. There’s a link in there to my first Angelfire site even. Remember kids, everything you do on the internet is PERMANENT! What’s so funny to me about my Angelfire site is that my version of a blog sometimes back then was to write on paper, then scan it in and post that. I should do that more often NOW haha We have a new scanner but I don’t know how to use it or I would totally do that. Also I was talking to Blake about this design just last week:

When I lived in Rob’s basement when I was in high school, on one wall I made this design, except in a circle, as a huge mural. I don’t think there are any pics of it but it was pretty cool and I was pretty proud of it. I was telling Blake about it last week but I can’t remember why, except I did say that I should draw it again in my sketchbook so it wouldn’t be lost forever and lo & behold, here it is!

I don’t like poetry. I don’t like reading it and I don’t like writing it, but after Rob and I broke up, I went through a brief poetry phase. Here’s one of them:

Piss Off

Go back to where you were.

Go back into her arms.

No one needs you here,

all you do is harm.

I hoped you were in a ditch somewhere.

I hoped for blood and gore.

I hoped that you had killed yourself and

your little whore.

I wished that you were starving,

And didn’t have a home.

I wanted you to know great pain,

I wanted you to roam.

I prayed that you had been beaten,

I prayed that you were dead.

I thought that you were staying there,

and you’d stop messing with my head.

But now you’re here and I hate you more,

Than I ever thought I would.

I thought that you had finally left,

finally gone for good.

I wished that you would disapear,

Or shrivel up and die.

But you’re still here living happily,

and I still wonder why.

Why couldn’t you have been a good boy,

And slit your fucking throat?

Nothing I would love better than to

watch your dead body bloat.

Can’t win them all I guess,

But I can always hope.

If you ever want to kill yourself,

I have lots of rope.

Hahahahaha!!! Isn’t that hilarious? I also think it’s funny that on my Angelfire site, I had a “PMS page“, which was basically the original version of my “Shit I Hate” page. I’m also still really proud of this troll story I wrote. If you knew the guy it was based on, you would find it hysterically funny too! :oD

More poetry; I wrote this one for Madison when she was first born:

Too funny!

But yeah, it amazes me how much and how little has really changed since then. Especially the latter for me since I feel like I’m still in the same place, doing the same thing as I was 11 or 12 years ago or however long it’s been (I started my first site in 1997, so how long ago was that?).  On the FB group, we were talking about “what if…” and wondering why none of us ever really made it “big” in the blog world and I still don’t have an answer. It kills me that people like Dooce get all this recognition for the same thing myself and several others have been doing better and longer. What makes her so special? What makes her more marketable than us? Why did she get a book deal? I don’t get it. She’s not the only one, I’ve written about the Mormon mommy bloggers before and that whole thing STILL baffles me.

Anyway, the trip down memory lane was a welcome change from the usual. Do you remember the E/N scene? What/who do you miss the most? Spill! I miss being pretty and having nice hair. Oh yeah, I still maintain a small webcam archive, which can be found here.

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

PS. Another thing I just remembered is that a few years ago on Facebook, someone referred to me as an “internet celebrity*” and Madison saw it and was like “wtf does that mean?” so I had to show her my site and some of my Camwhores archive and explain the whole shebang to her. She actually thought it was really cool but now that she’s aware of the fact that there’s a relatively big audience, she won’t let me post everything about her anymore, which sucks, but I respect that. Wes knows about everything but my activity on Camwhores and he thinks it’s the coolest thing ever and constantly tell me what I should tell you guys about. “Tell them I did this!” he says all the time, like when I’m filing him or taking his picture. A total ham.

Okay, nurse Cheryl (ugh) is going to be here in 2 hours. I’d better get a bit more sleep.

(* It’s easy to be an “internet celebrity” when there are only 50 people on the whole entire internet haha)

Edit: Apparently Steph formerly of Delightz.net made the FB group, not Artfag and Steph wrote a really nice post about it which you can find here.

Edit #2: Here’s Artfag’s post about the whole thing.

So I’ll admit I’ve been a pretty awful denizen of the internet and didn’t really know what the whole SOPA deal was until about 5 minutes ago. It’s really fucking important that you read his if you don’t know what it’s about either because if it passes, it WILL affect you.

Not that it makes a lick of difference, but my site will “go dark” tomorrow in solidarity with the other sites that are protesting this bill. That means I won’t be updating. I also won’t be tweeting or doing anything considered as providing content because that’s exactly what’ll happen if this passes, sites you care about will go dark. The bottom line is that this will affect the internet as we all know it. Like I said, read the above link for a breakdown on it and see for yourself and do me a favour? Really click the link and read it. Because if this breakdown is all true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then we could all be in very deep shit if SOPA passes. I can’t do a damn thing from my little bunker in Canada but you? You reading this? I bet YOU can. So do it.

This morning I decided to start reading up on the Paul Christoforo situation because I stopped following it for a few days and I went to his Twitter account and read that he linked THIS article. So I read the article. And it kinda pissed me off.

.

I’ll just start in order with the things that bugged me:

Yet despite all the drama, Christoforo said he hasn’t lost any of his other accounts, aside from Avenger. “It hasn’t affected my business yet,” he said. “Clients have brought it up, but they’ve mainly laughed about it. I haven’t lost any clients.”

I think that’s a pretty brazen thing to say, to be honest. That’s not “humble”, as he claims he is now, or “apologetic”, that’s arrogant. That’s like saying, “You missed me! You missed me! Now ya hafta kiss me!”  If I were the internet, I’d smack him twice as hard for that comment.

“I didn’t know who that guy at Penny Arcade was,” he admitted. “If I had known, I would have treated the situation a little better. PAX is a great show. What he does is what I’ve been idolizing since I was a kid. It’s admirable he’s put that together. He has a lot of connections, ones I want too.”

This is what he’s still not comprehending: it doesn’t matter WHO he was, you don’t treat *people* like garbage! His status in the gaming community shouldn’t matter! If you start off treating people nicely and with respect, then that’s (almost always) what you get back.

Yet while admitting he handled things badly, Christoforo said he also felt the situation could have been different if Krahulik approached the situation differently.

“He called me a bully, but he was being a bully … especially when he emailed me out of the blue, saying ‘That’s f***ing s***ty, you’re banned from PAX,’ I was like ‘Who the f*** are you? That’s how you introduce yourself? … I dont want to call him out, but he could have gone about that a totally different way, he could have said, ‘Hey, I run the show, that email was a little unprofessional, if you don’t do something to apologize I don’t want you at my show.’ But he just came at me and said, indirectly, ‘Hey, f*** you, you’re banned from PAX.’ Is that what you’d call professional? I wouldn’t.”

“BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!!!! HE STARTED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!” Give me a fucking break. You treat your customer like shit and someone sticks up for him and you don’t think he was professional? Please. Why should he be nice to you after that? And I read the e-mails, I don’t recall Mike/Gabe swearing at him.

Christoforo also said his response was driven in part by what he saw as the disrespectful tone of the messages that came before it. “Not that I don’t have respect for anybody, but if someone’s badmouthing me or being a little punk or being a jerk, they don’t deserve respect,” he said. “You can’t expect to go up and say ‘Hey you piece of s***,’ and expect respect. Send an email, introduce yourself. … I trust everybody until they give me a reason not to respect them. I’m not a tough guy, not a bully, but at same time not going to take s*** if it’s uncalled for.

Then you should be nowhere near customer service e-mails. Or any e-mails dealing with the public. At all. NewsFALASH: the customer should always be treated with professionalism and respect, even if they’re being a jerk, which the customer in question was NOT. You have to swallow your ego and weather the storm, that’s just how customer service goes. How is this not base knowledge?

As it has been said, all throughout the gaming industry already, Paul Christoforo isn’t sorry he treated his customer like shit, he’s sorry he got caught.  The guy is not smart and with this article, he’s just digging himself a deeper hole. What on Earth ever made him think that he’d be good at PR?

Edit: Here are a couple of other things to follow up with. Reddit/ADWEEK

Edit #2: AND NOW FOR SOME EXTORTION, KIDS!

First I saw this article from Penny Arcade.
Then my friend Skeet said, “oh no honey, it gets worse” and I came very close to urinating all over myself.
Then I read this and almost shat myself.
Then Larissa posted this and now I’m done:

Edit: Dammit, the Reddit post is now gone but the comments aren’t. Someone posted this.

Edit #2: PA updated with this.

Edit #3: MOAR.

Edit #4: Oh snap.

Edit #5: Parody video.