You may have read it on the MediaGoblin blog already, but the MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign was a huge success!

I have more I want to say on this subject, but for now I just wanted to echo Joey Hess's blogpost of similar name. And it's a solid fact now: from now till the end of 2013 I've basically been hired by people who believe in all of the ideas we were selling in the MediaGoblin campaign: that the internet needs decentralized and federated media publishing, that MediaGoblin is the platform to do it, and that we're a really fun project that can make this all happen.

The campaign has been an interesting experience, and I certainly intend to write more about it. I've never done everything else that used all of my skills so thoroughly... but I guess what I mean by that is coming up in another post very shortly. For now, I'm just basking in the awesome that we sold the world on a dream and I've essentially been hired by that same world to build it. How often do people get to spec out their dreams and live them?

Now I'd better get back to working on things! Got quite a lot to get done so we can bring this dream we're promising to life! Not to mention shipping out... and making!... all those rewards we promised. :)

As those who have read my previous entries know, I quit my job of three years as senior software engineer at Creative Commons to pursue the free software project I've been running, MediaGoblin. I'd explain a bit further what MediaGoblin is but actually there's no reason to: we're in the middle of running a fundraising campaign, and we put a video together that explains everything wonderfully already. So what you really ought to do is click through to:

Go ahead visit the above link! Check out the campaign! Watch the video! Donate! Excitedly link the campaign to your friends! Then come back here. I'll still be around.

Okay, back? Awesome. So the campaign has gone live and is going well. It's been a major portion of my life the last couple of months. For the one and a half months leading up to the campaign, it was my life. And it still is. I stressed out about it all the way leading up to the campaign launch and I am, in fact, still stressing out about it now. But it's a good kind of stress. We're getting a lot of positive reactions from people, and I feel great about that. I really do believe that MediaGoblin is the most important thing I've ever worked on in my life, and so having this be a success is important to me. And having it be important to other people... well that's important to me, too.

There's a couple of things that people have been asking me about related to the campaign. People seem fairly curious about the process of making the video and ramping up the campaign, and especially I keep getting asked, "Why did you go through the Free Software Foundation? Why not Kickstarter?" Those are both really good questions, so I'll take a shot at answering them.

Why the Free Software Foundation? Why not Kickstarter?

Kinda long, so here's a tl;dr:

• We don't dislike Kickstarter
• FSF offered for us to do the donation campaign through them; didn't have all the features we wanted, but were willing to implement them
• We decided to go with them because they threw their weight behind our campaign, because of their integrity, and because of our aligned ideals.

Let's go with this one first, because people seem so curious about it. What I'll first say was that this wasn't a decision we rushed into. A couple of months ago, I was in Boston and meeting with MediaGoblin co-conspirators Will Kahn-Greene and Deb Nicholson about this. We were hanging out at and around the FSF offices. At that point, we knew we were launching a campaign, but didn't know the details. And this was a major point of discussion: do we go with Kickstarter, or we go with the Free Software Foundation? We did know was that John Sullivan had expressed interest in us doing things through the Free Software Foundation, and so that was an option.

We chose the Free Software Foundation over Kickstarter for various reasons. The reason we didn't go with Kickstarter isn't that we dislike Kickstarter, or thought that it would be particularly bad for us. I actually think that Kickstarter is doing a good job in paving a way forward for projects to be funded in ways that frees them to focus on what they need to; if I have a major complaint, it's that I wish people would mostly hold projects to the standard that if they're donating to them, they shouldn't be locking down their stuff. If the public is funding you, doesn't it make sense that you are in a sense beholden to the public? I wish people would hold things they donate to to a standard where they encourage projects to adopt free licenses. But anyway, that's more of a wish that I wish we'd see more free software and free culture benefitting from Kickstarter like systems than something against Kickstarter. And Kickstarter was fairly tempting for various reasons: they've done a good job of proving themselves. We know their stuff works, it's fairly expected how stuff would run, and it's something people recognize and feel comfortable giving money to. My friend Aeva said, "When I see something on Kickstarter, I have a temptation to just throw money at it." So not choosing Kickstarter would mean leaving a lot of that behind.

So why did we choose the Free Software Foundation? There was reason to be cautious about it: we knew what to expect if we went with Kickstarter. While I have a lot of trust in the Free Software Foundation, we couldn't be sure how things would work out running a campaign like this because they simply hadn't done such a thing before. We had done something similar with the FSF with Liberated Pixel Cup, but it wasn't on this scale. When we met with John, we listed a series of things that we'd still need: we needed the ability for the system to offer rewards (such as the 3d model, t-shirt, etc options we have now), we needed the ability to theme the campaign page, we needed to be able to email people who donated with updates as the campaign progressed, we needed the form to work this way and that, we needed a progress bar that updated automatically each time someone donated, and so on. The FSF didn't have a way set up to do these things yet, and we wanted to go live with the campaign in a month and a half. Would the FSF be able to do it on time? Would the FSF want to do it? John said that he thought so, and yes. This was a direction that they were interested in going in, both for themselves and likely for future projects, so it was a good opportunity for them to push their systems in that direction.

At that point, we decided to go with the FSF. First of all, the fact that this was a new thing but that the FSF was interested in pushing in this direction means there'd be a certain kind of guinea-pig uncertainty, but it also meant something else: the FSF had a lot of faith in MediaGoblin and were willing to throw their weight behind it. That meant a lot, and also meant something strategically: there's a lot of projects swimming around on Kickstarter and etc right now, and it would be easy to get lost in that pool. The fact that the FSF was willing to back us meant that we'd stand out in a certain way, at least to a certain audience. And we could benefit from their connections and experience.

There's another aspect to it too: the FSF is a nonprofit. I'm not sure whether this is resonating with donors or not, but at least to me, it's significant: the FSF is an organization that has a mission and integrity. By going through the FSF, we are also beholden to that mission and integrity. The FSF wasn't going to just toss all the money raised by this project over to us: we had to show that we were doing the work to advance the project to get it. To me, that seems like a feature, at least one that's donor-facing (though I'm not sure whether or not people are picking up on that). You can have whatever opinion you want about the FSF, but one thing is indisputable, maybe even above any other org I know of: they stick with their principles. And I hope that message that the FSF was backing us passed on to people. And to some people, it seemed to. (I guess also, if you go through a nonprofit, donations are tax-deductable. Some people seem to appreciate that.) The FSF is also taking an "administrative cut", just as Kickstarter would, of the money raised. I think it's also significant that the organization that gets that cut be one who's working to advance things that I believe in.

There were some other benefits too: we had a lot more control over our site design by doing things on our own (and MediaGoblin's usual graphic designer, Jef van Schendel, was commissioned to do the design of the campaign site, and did an awesome job). But... I think the being endorsed by an organization with that kind of trust and integrity was the most important thing. And I'll also admit that there is an element of personal interest here: is it possible for a nonprofit to reproduce the same kind of experience that Kickstarter has? Because that's significant to me. And one thing that would come out of this is that the FSF would be using free software to run the campaign also. The thing is mostly run by CiviCRM, so unlike Kickstarter, advancements gained in running it could benefit the software and other people running such software. And if we could prove that this works, that would be good.

That said, even after we made that decision, even though I have a strong amount of trust in the FSF, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I couldn't be anything but nervous about things until the campaign actually went live. I'm happy to say that things did work out and we had a successful launch. People seem very responsive to our campaign, and the FSF's stuff is working great. And the FSF really has thrown themselves behind the campaign. I've been working with both people from the FSF systems team and especially John Sullivan and Zak Rogoff, one of the new campaigns team members (who's really been a pleasure to work with so far). They really have been trying hard to make this a success, and I'm really pleased with it.

We've had a good start, but we've still got a long way to go. But one thing's for sure, the campaign is only going to be a success if people like you pitch in and spread the word about the campaign. So please help... and spread the word!

And I guess that blogpost was long enough, so the "making of the campaign" will have to be a part two!

I'm long overdue for another life update. I guess the last update I gave was in June with a supplemental post to update that I was leaving CC to focus on MediaGoblin. So, 4 months. That doesn't seem like a long time when I put it in month-numbers. In my mind though, it feels like a universe away. So many changes have happened in my life at once that it feels impossible to record them in one entry. Which I guess is why I intended to blog earlier to avoid this situation, but of course, I didn't do such a thing. Oh well, "life update" blogposts are fairly self-indulgent; interesting mostly as a record to myself and to keep the scattered few family and friends who have passing interest informed.

I don't think I can really intelligently list everything off, but let's start with bullet points and see where we go from there.

• First of all, I wrapped up my work at Creative Commons. Well, kind of. I'm still somewhat involved as a contractor (details on that still being worked out though, so even that is vague), but anyway, there certainly was a significant "wrapping up" phase that happened during that exiting period of two months, during which a lot of the other things I'll be talking about happened consecutively. Largely I did a lot of work to try to put the tech team in as best of a place as I could and push forward various agendas I care about very much so personally forward (CC 4.0 stuff especially). There was also a lot of Liberated Pixel Cup wrapup stuff, but that actually kind of deserves its own entry, so I guess I'll list that next.

• Liberated Pixel Cup's contest submissions on both art and code wrapped up and we got tons of amazing results. Way more than we anticipated, and way more than we prepared for. We did end up wrapping up the art judging but very much so significantly after when I would have liked to seen it wrapped up. Part of this was because of how overwhelmed we were by so many high quality entries, and thus a lot of judges fell through (not their fault necessarily given we didn't prepare them, didn't know to prepare them, for the volume of stuff). Another part of it was because Bart and I, the main organizers of the project, both had several large disruptions to our project; him with some family medical emergencies, me with being "homeless" for two weeks (more on that below) and settling into a new place and launching a major campaign all at once. The code side of things still needs to be judged, and I'll be returning some focus to organizing that shortly. Anyway, failure on our part at all largely comes in another way from a large amount of success, so that's a weird situation of pride and guilt that I'm feeling right now. It's good to have one of my major dreams come true and proven right, anyway.

• Kind of a weird off-note but right before the move I made a major change to my mail setup. For years I had been using a terrible pop + fetchmail + local spamasssassin + gnus setup that I had cobbled together before I understand how any of those things worked from mailing lists and wiki pages and all sorts of cargo to build cults from. Problem: I could only check mail from my desktop, and when traveling, I always had the stress-inducing process of having to ssh into my desktop from wherever and open up gnus. I finally decided I was tired of that, and in a long and painful process that I really should have documented but didn't, I moved my mail over from gnus and nnml with some hacky elisp over to offlineimap and the incredible mu4e. mu4e is a real pleasure... I even added a small extension called mu4e-uqueue to make iterating through my mail a bit easier. Definitely happy with the change.

• So yes, about the move. First, about leaving, which I have more to say about than probably makes sense. A couple of years ago we had the misfortune of moving to DeKalb/Deklabbs and a couple of months ago we had the good fortune to finally move out. DeKalb wasn't so bad for Morgan (and she had given me the option to live someplace closer to Chicago or in far west Chicago, but I didn't want her to have such a long commute) mostly because she had a community there. But I didn't... I was mostly friendless and depressed, which isn't good when you work from home. I had such a lack of community and sense of connection (excepting a university LUG that I attended sporadically) that I realized there were only a few things I would feel at all like I missed in DeKalb: the food co-op, the coffee shop, and most especially the restaurant Pita Pete's, which I ate at almost every other day (and I made sure the exact last thing we did before driving out of town for the final time was to get one last delicious seitan wrap). Going out to eat was in some ways one of the few connections I had to other people living in that town, so we did it quite a bit. On the last day there I was in a "finally, I'm getting the fuck out of this town" kind of mood. I went to the coffee shop, got a final coffee, and the woman behind the counter asked me if I'd come back. I said I didn't think so, I didn't think I'd miss anything, except maybe this place a little bit and Pita Pete's, but not really that much anyway. She told me that I should come back and visit, they'd miss me (not really sure that's just one of those things you say or not) and I asked her if she was still there as a college student (largely because I had the "so, when are you gonna get the fuck out of this town too?" type attitude on the mind) and she said she used to be, but she stayed around because she loved DeKalb. So, something about that moment felt significant, that there really wasn't an intrinsic terribleness to the area... it was really just a lack of connection to anything on my part.

• So enough whining about a place I don't even have to live at anymore... we had someplace new and exciting to move to... Madison! But before we could do that we had a two week space of non-residence between our leases. Technically, we were without a home, so were "homeless" in one sense, but that seems degrading to people who are actually homeless, since our situation was the opposite of any sort of hardship. (Whatever, I'm rambling. Whatever to that too, this whole post is a big ramble.) Quite the opposite: we decided to do something we really haven't done much as a couple and do some vacation traveling.

  We had a two part-trip, first in Boston, then in New York. In Boston Morgan and I stayed with our good friend Deb Nicholson. For Morgan, this was pure vacation. For me, it was kind of a "work-cation"; I spent a lot of time hanging out at the FSF and meeting with various free softwareish people (a few highlights were meeting friends Mo and Ray of Fedora hackingness for lunch and Bassam Kurdali and Fateh Slavitskaya of Tube for dinner, as well as hanging out with a lot of friends from the FSF). Will Kahn-Greene also came down and Will, Deb and I gathered to discuss the MediaGoblin campaign, how we'd go about it, and whether we'd go a Kickstarter type route or do things through the FSF (whom had mentioned they would likely be interested in doing such a thing). After laying out a long list of requirements that the FSF would have to add for our campaign to work with them, we all agreed on that route forward.

  At some point, Deb's partner Ernie asked me when I was going to stop working and start vacationing. Actually, hanging out with free software people, and even doing the MediaGoblin stuff while lurking at the FSF offices, had me in a better mood than I had been in ages. Guess that's how I roll.

  Nonetheless, we also did some wonderful hanging out and seeing some touristy things with Deb, who as always, is a great host and excellent friend. Anyway, Boston was great times.

• In-between Boston and New York, we thought we'd try to play it cheap by going to a smaller town in-between and just relaxing and reading and keeping things simple. So we MegaBus'ed it to Hartford.

  When I told people in Boston that we'd be having a few days in Hartford, we got a lot of "Oh god, why would you do that?" and stories about Hartford's insurance industry lobbying to kill all taxes, thus completely not investing in any infrastructure, and better hope you won't be stabbed, blah blah. I figured these were exaggerations from township rivalry. It couldn't be any more boring than DeKalb, anyway. I was wrong. I won't go into details, but Hartford kind of feels like one huge ghetto. Sad city Hartford indeed. Anyway, we took the fastest trip out of there we could, which meant buying extra bus tickets and spending the extra money I didn't want to spend in New York, but there you go.

• New York was great though. I didn't really do any work, so that was real vacation for me. Some high points were museums, walking around Central Park, weird but delightful films, live puppetry, and meeting MediaGoblin contributors Aaron Williamson and Sam Kleinman. But maybe most of all I really enjoyed hanging out with Karen Sandler and her husband. The original plans to record my interview on Free as in Freedom while I was in-person didn't work out, but on the up side we got lunch on Karen's rooftop, which is had a crazy amazing view, and unsurprisingly really great conversation.

  Oh, and we didn't bring back bedbugs. Which is great, given that's a huge phobia of mine, and we were staying in New York.

• We moved to Madison. Madison is, I will say, completely and totally amazing. For some reason I was afraid of moving to another college town after DeKalb, but there is simply no resemblance between towns here. Madison has a great tech community, amazing food, lots of interesting things going on and people, and so on. Also, we live between two lakes and are three houses away from the town's amazing Willy Street Food Co-op.

  If you ever plan on stopping through Madison, maybe consider contacting me... we have crash-space, and an extra desk for people to work from.

  Anyway, Madison is amazing. I'm very happy with the move.

• Some bad news on Morgan's health. I won't go into details, but some things we thought were fixed weren't. Lots of stress.

• Last Saturday my mom got married. I really like the guy she married, and the wedding was beautiful. Plus, I didn't screw up my part in the ceremony too badly. Morgan and I danced for five hours straight at the reception having a wonderful time and regretting it the next day.

• Most significantly of all though is the MediaGoblin campaign. This will get a post of its own shortly (hopefully we launch this week) but what I will say now is that I've been working insanely hard on it. The video, the website (with commissioned help from Jef van Schendel), etc are all coming together well, and things are mostly coordinated with the FSF.

  In the meanwhile, I am really fried. I have put as much of myself as is possible into the campaign over the last month and a half, pretty much working as much around the clock as my body and mind will let me. I guess I can't complain though if I am living the dream?

  Or hopefully at least I will be! It really depends on how the fundraiser comes out. Really hoping for the best. As said, I've poured myself into it... and I think at least that the results are really good and I've tried my damndest.

  I'm feeling quite confident that this campaign is the right thing at the right time in many different ways, but most especially in the "more socially important than ever" type way. Here's hoping everything goes right. You'll certainly hear about it here when things launch, which is fairly imminent.

So those are the things on my mind these days. More news about the campaign comin' up shortly.

I'm extremely pleased to say that I was recorded on the Free as in Freedom show and that episode is now out; you can listen to the episode here.

In many ways this feels like a real honor. A few years ago when I had just joined at Creative Commons I listened to Mike Linksvayer speak as a guest on the show (it was called the Software Freedom Law Show back then, but it's mostly the same thing) and I remembered thinking that that was the height of coolness. Which, for one thing, I'm sure Mike will roll his eyes at that if he reads this blogpost, and for another, shows just how incredibly off my sense of what's cool is. (You know there's something wrong with you when the height of your week is when a new episode of an autogenerated fake news podcast comes out.)

Anyway, maybe because of that, it was both a real honor to be on the show, and also cause for me to be extremely nervous. I wasn't really nervous before the recording, and wasn't really during or immediately afterwards. But later after the recording happened I kept dwelling on a few things I knew I could have answered better: I gave a totally derpy answer as to why I got involved in free software partly because I was trying to troll Bradley Kuhn for not reading one of my blogposts (why I got involved in free software, and the question of how to get people involved in free software today, which I have strong opinions on, are posts maybe I'll make in the future). Also, my copyleft comic came up and Bradley basically suggested that I describe it and I totally avoided doing so, namely because I'm embarassed that it has the word "freetarded" in it (I think the word that's based on is a harmful and terrible one, but the comic text is partly based on some actual conversations I've had, and the comic isn't funny when rewritten any other way, as straw-man'ish as it is). And I finally also realized what my friend Asheesh meant when I complimented him on an interview he was on and he said something like "I'm actually somewhat surprised when people find the things I say interesting, because I've been thinking them in my head so long that I just assume they sound really obvious." (Not anywhere near an exact quote.) Also, we had just moved, and I felt kind of tired, and I was worried that that may have spilled through.

But I gave it a listen today, and I feel like the episode goes really well from start to finish. Not too derpy after all. But obviously you should give it a listen and judge for yourself.

Also, my life has been jam-packed lately. I'm not sure I've ever had such an intense number of things happen in a couple of months as I have recently, and I'd like to write some of it down before I forget to it. But as I mentioned in the podcast, I am neck deep preparing for the MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign because I am trying to figure out how to be able to pay for myself to focus on MediaGoblin. So, a big "life update" post is due soon. But probably not until this crazy month is over!

Morgan and I went and saw the film Brave recently. I thought it was good, maybe worth a second seeing even. It was certainly pretty. And after twelve (twelve!) films in a row by Pixar where the primary character was male (don't give me the "The Incredibles" had the mom and daughter characters either... those were main characters, but there was a decidedly "primary character" and that person was not a woman), it was probably the right film to make. It takes a stand of sorts: women can be heroes too, should be free to make their own decisions and set their own life directions, and manages to say all this cleanly without feeling at all like it beat you over the head. So I'm glad films like this are being made, and given Pixar's long period of negligence, it was probably the right film for them to finally make.

That said, here's my worry: so, great, Pixar made a film that's good, and largely about how you can be a woman and a hero. Now that we've established that, will we have other films about women heroes with that pretext established? I'm worried that either we won't see any ("hey, we hit our films about women quota anyway, right?"), or there will be a long and dry spell of no films where a woman is the primary character, and then we get another one that steps out and reminds us, "Oh hey yeah, by the way, women can be awesome heroes too! Don't forget about that!"

What I'm trying to say here is: why aren't there more films where women just are heroes? Can we get to the point where the pretext that women can be heroes is established and they just... are?

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this; in fact when I first saw the trailer for Brave, I made similar comments:

"Sintel beat them to it though. I also feel like the way Sintel did it was best: a female character who just was awesome, without even a gender battle backdrop. (Challenging patriarchy is good, but a state where female leads are just awesome from the get-go and we're not even questioning that is better.)"

Deb pointed out that the character of Sintel is maybe not the best example as to possibly being a bit too "shaped for dudes to look at" in that "it would be kind of radical for a pudgy, awkward girl to be chosen in a fantasy story every so often". That said, I was glad that a free culture film beat out Pixar/Dreamworks/etc in putting out a film where the primary character was a woman, and that she was just awesome and had an interesting story and adventure without needing to justify it.

It's not that these films don't get made, even in the animated world; I can think of a few examples: Spirited Away, and The Triplets of Belleville (probably my favorite film ever, with a great amount of adventure and a very non-traditional "hero" of sorts in the grandmother (tangentially the word "hero" is not really great in this article, I really mean "primary character" or "character of focus", but those sound a bit belabored to say)). And on the free culture end of things, Tube is not out yet, but will succeed I think here. But anyway, these films seem sparse.

So I'd like to see more films, especially animated films, that don't fit the lame "princess"/"damsel in distress" archetype but that have strong female characters. And there may yet still be a role for films like Brave (or Mulan in the 1990s) that try assert clearly that women can be awesome. But I hope that's not an unfortunate trope that gets developed... do we really want to teach our young girls "You can be anything you want, as long as it's a woman who proves that you can be anyone you want as a woman?" What I'm hoping, basically, is that more films really and truly accept the premise that these films are trying to put down. Can we get to the point where we've simply agreed on this, and have a large number of films that simply have characters doing awesome things, those characters are women, and we've accepted that as just being normal? Because I think that would really be a progressive message for future generations.

Or, you know, we could decide this film hit our "say that women can be awesome" quota, and go back to making films where the primary characters are always dudes.

(Note: this started out as a longer post about the history and rationale of the Liberated Pixel Cup under a subheading called "where games go, technology follows". But I found that this section got so long it merited its own post, so I decided to break it out.)

I've heard it stated before that "games aren't important" or aren't a priority by multiple people in free software (I'm not sure I've heard the same in free culture communities). Most notably, I've heard this said by Bradley Kuhn, for example in this blogpost:

You might be wondering, "Ok, so if it's pure entertainment software, is it acceptable for it to be proprietary?". I have often said: if all published and deployed software in the world were guaranteed Free Software except for video games, I wouldn't work on the cause of software freedom anymore. Ultimately, I am not particularly concerned about the control structures in our culture that exist for pure entertainment. [...]

Bradley is someone I couldn't admire more for his devotion to free software, so don't misinterpret this statement; if anything the fact that I agree so much in general with Bradley is why this exception bothers me so greatly. But it does bother me: I think games are important for cultural and software freedom issues, and I feel that ignoring them is something we do in the movement at our own risk. (By the way, Bradley has asked me to further explain my position on why free software games matter, so that's partly why I'm writing this... I'm not just picking on him.)

There are several reasons for this, but the first and foremost of these are that where games go, the rest of technology follows. I mean this both in the sense that games are an indicator (of both the exciting opportunities and dangers of) where technology will go.

Here's an example: DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is an issue of great concern for both free software and free culture people alike. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, if you bought a proprietary game for your MS-DOS running PC, Commodore 64 computer, or et cetera, you may remember the rise of copy protection software coming with games. Many of these early copy protection methods were even fairly silly: many games would have a screen which would ask you to ask you to enter a word from a page, paragraph, and word number within that paragraph from the instruction manual before it would start the game. The phenomenon of demoscene culture, including a large amount of beautiful artwork and music, came largely out of breaking early forms of DRM copy protection... for all sorts of software of course, but most especially games.

Even now, we see DRM is coming to GNU/Linux operating systems through Steam, a games distribution platform (and disturbingly enough for many free software operating system users who worry about DRM, much of the reaction is celebration). And the rise of the "app store" model came with the rise of mobile computing as game platforms. (I realize that in this post I don't have any hard evidence associating the rise of app stores or DRM with games, but observationally at least I've found this to be true, and it appears that games make up the largest category of "app store" downloads.) I think we will see these trends continue to get worse, and games will continue to lead the way.

Not all "indicators of the future" are necessarily foretelling of things that are bad. One of the smartest things I think Mozilla ever invested money and time into was Browser Quest (which was released shortly after Liberated Pixel Cup was announced with a very similar style... we didn't know about it, but welcomed its release). Browser Quest was a great example that hey, this HTML5 stuff is actually happening, and here's a tangible thing you can see to prove that (not to mention it put Mozilla at the forefront of many minds as an innovator in that space).

Aside from being an indicator of the future, people want games. I spent a good portion of the 2000s surviving off of a sparse diet of kobo-deluxe, tuxracer, supertux, and nethack. This managed to be enough for me (well, kind of... okay, not really), but it isn't enough for everyone. There's another bit to this: sure, you don't actually need games to have a working system. But "you also don't really need to live to live" either: you could go through life with the most minimal forms of food, clothing, shelter but absolutely no culture, and you'd still be living in a literal sense... but it would be a fairly miserable life. Likewise, people want entertainment, and video games are the most computer-centric of all forms of entertainment on a computer. If we don't provide them, people will move elsewhere. So I'd actually argue that an operating system that does not provide games is actually an incomplete system. (Actually, I'm not the only one who thinks this; RMS wrote in an essay that "a complete system needs games too".)

There's one more major reason why free software/culture games matter, and it's definitely a major point of thinking behind the Liberated Pixel Cup: games are a great motivation to get people to start hacking and authoring things. Almost every hacker my age that I know cites video games as a source of inspiration to get into programming. (Speaking personally, the first major programming I ever did was extending a [proprietary!] game. It's fair enough to say that I wouldn't be a programmer today if it weren't for an interest in game programming, and that is true of several of my friends as well.) But if that is true, why then do we have so few finished and polished free software games? Answering that question actually deserves of a post of its own (and indeed, solving that riddle is a good portion of the motive behind Liberated Pixel Cup), but it's enough to say for now that we are missing opportunities of encouraging future hackers by not making free software a welcoming playground for game development.

So, games are significant for a couple of reasons: they point to the general future direction of technology, good or bad, so we should pay attention to them. Furthermore we should make sure we are providing and building games, if for no other reason than to make the future we want viable (I still think that a system that doesn't address games, as I've outlined above, is an incomplete system, and one that most people ultimately will not use... or, you know, we could just sit aside and let the games continue to push the DRM'ed app store model along and watch our digital freedoms erode). But if none of the above reasons were insufficient, games are something people get excited about building. And helping people get excited about hacking and making things should be reason enough!

Still no comments working on my blog; but feel free to discuss on identi.ca (or ostatus federated equivalent).

I said in my last update that I was partly clearing my life update news queue because I had something much bigger to announce. So here it is:

I just gave my notice at Creative Commons... I'm leaving so I can spend a greater amount of time focusing on my pet project, MediaGoblin.

This should be a pretty smooth and gradual transition if all goes as planned... I care deeply about the success of CC and the tech team, so we've agreed on me staying part-time to ease the transition of the team and to help wrap up the projects I've been working on. So I feel good about that. One thing is for sure: working at Creative Commons these last three years as a software engineer has been a rewarding, fulfilling, and unique life opportunity, and I'm glad to have had it. I'm glad that I'll be leaving in a way that I can feel good about both for myself and for Creative Commons.

I've never had a project that I've cared about as deeply as MediaGoblin before, nor one that I thought was as important socially as MediaGoblin is. So I am planning to shift focus so I can more carefully help the project along. MediaGoblin is also much more than just my project; we have a lot of contributors who have invested much time and energy into it. Yet, at the same time, I've observed that every time I step away from the project it seems to grind to a halt, and whenever that happens I get depressed. For the last year, I've dumped 100% of my weekend, vacation, holiday time into MediaGoblin. I need a way to be able to spend even more time on MediaGoblin than I already am while avoiding burnout.

You might be wondering: how am I going to fund this? I have some ideas, and will be working on it, but in the meanwhile I don't have anything concretely set up. I have the part time CC work, and I have some possible contracting opportunities lined up, but I'd also like to make MediaGoblin development funding sustainable.

It'll be an interesting and exciting year ahead. There are a lot of transitions going on in my life, including the move to Madison, but I think this is the most interesting and exciting one for me.

On to the next chapter!

There's a ton of things going on in my life right now. A ton of things! Enough that it's been hard to do any blogging lately because I've been just so damned busy. And in the next few days there are some new things to announce as well, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to dequeue a bit before I make any further announcements.

MediaGoblin

First, let's start with MediaGoblin. We've passed our one year anniversary, and I feel we have an impressive set of things to look back on. Already we've surpassed my wildest expectations in a large set of ways: we have not only images support, but also video and audio support. We have OpenStreetMap support. We did a huge overhaul switching from MongoDB to SQL(Alchemy). (Okay, maybe that's not an interesting accomplishment generally, but it was a huge undertaking.) On the horizon are several other things, including plugin support, theming support, and hopefully federation stuff. If you're interested in such things, consider subscribing to the MediaGoblin news feed.

There's been a number of good articles about MediaGoblin recently, but here are two really good ones:

• MediaGoblin interview with me on OpenSource.com
• MediaGoblin's One Year Anniversary: What's Next? (another interview with me)

We've a bunch of cool things, and a really awesome community. We have somewhere around 50 people who have contributed to the project over the last year. I think that's really impressive for a new project.

And that's actually been one of the big themes of the last year: discovering I actually do have some fairly good leadership skills. Up until now I've mostly assumed I'm way too disorganized and distractable of a person to be a good leader. But I feel like the last year has proven me wrong. In fact, I feel that my long history of learning techniques to deal with my ADD in a sense has helped: I know how to write out plans for things in orgmode, break them into small tasks, and execute them. Fears of me not being capable to stay focused when working from home actually helped me learn to have very rigorous work habits. And having those traits has helped a lot.

Anyway, the MediaGoblin community is an amazing group of people, and I'm so happy to be working on the project. A little over a year ago I said:

We're still kind of running on hopes and dreams here, and hopefully those hopes and dreams can become true. It'll be a lot of hard work, but I think we can do it. At the very least, we need to try!

That statement is still true to some extent, but we're running on more than just hopes and dreams at this point. We have some real sites running the software (but we could use some more) and more importantly we have more than just an idea of a codebase, we have something very solid. It's been a thrilling year, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Work at Creative Commons (generally)

This year at Creative Commons has been an interesting one, and somewhat of a mixed one. About a year ago there were some changes in the org and a number of people I care about have left. This includes my former boss, Nathan Yergler, and more slowly the stepping back of Mike Linksvayer, among others. Both of these people especially have been both friends and mentors, and it has been sad to see them go.

On the other side, the last year has been interesting in some other ways. Especially, I've been glad to see some other great people join, including Greg Grossmeier and my good friend Lunpa. These are both people I greatly admire, and over the last year I've seen them do some great things.

There has been another interesting thing too: in the void since Nathan Yergler left, I became the somehow official and yet unofficial tech team manager/representative. So, in addition to MediaGoblin, here is another space where I've learned quite a bit about leadership, including the fact that I seem to be decently competent at doing it. While I have done some programming work over the last year (particularly around simplifying CC's er... complex... translation tooling), I have more and more spent time on representation and planning. This was an unexpected shift for me, but one I'm glad I've had the opportunity to do. I feel I've had a lot of growth over the last year, especially in the areas of planning and "workplace diplomacy". I think that's one of the big lessons I've learned this year: the best way to think of yourself in a leadership position is that of a diplomat. There are usually a lot of things people want out of a situation... it's your job to identify what makes sense and to negotiate things, be a buffer, and help people do good. I wouldn't say I've been a perfect manager in this position, but I think overall things have been good, and I'm proud of the results I have had in the er... quasi-position.

Interactive chooser mockup by Lunpa, not me.

Some other interesting things have happened over the last year as well. Part of these things are the projects that we are rolling out. One thing is a new, interactive chooser. We also have a legalcode errata tool ready to go, we just need sign-off on some information. Anyway, there have been other things too, but I'm particularly proud of the work the tech team has done, especially Lunpa, on this work. And it has been great to watch and help with... even though that help has been partly from a different, more manager-y perspective than I am used to.

Another interesting thing that has happened is that I've been more involved with license and legalcode work, especially in the 4.0 license process. But things actually started with the work to declare CC0 and GPL to be compatible and CC0 to be acceptable for free software usage (sadly, but possibly for the best, we submitted for OSI approval then later withdrew for reasons having to do with patents, equitable estoppel, and really long mailing list threads that you can read if you care to). I have been involved in several things, including trying to raise the visibility of complexities involving games, 3d printing, and functional content. There were a lot of points explained through that, but the most interesting bit is perhaps the issue of what happens in complex examples where functional and creative works are combined in particular and complex ways, and the former uses the GPL and the latter uses CC BY-SA, and there's an unintended incompatibility of copyleft licenses. This has lead to discussions between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center about possible compatibility with CC BY[-SA] 4.0 and the GPL. Nothing is resolved at this time, but I am thrilled that this conversation is moving forward. I often comment that one semi-official role of the CC Tech Team is to be a bridge back to free and open source software, and this is probably an even more clear and direct example than most.

Anyway, as is probably evident above, it has been a mixed year, but a very interesting one that I'm glad to have been part of. And anyway, there's one more thing I haven't discussed in the above...

Liberated Pixel Cup

Liberated Pixel Cup! This project is in some ways simultaneously the most "unnecessary" appearing of projects I've worked on recently, especially at CC, and yet I think it is actually maybe one of the most important.

I guess I ought to say what Liberated Pixel Cup is. In a sense, visiting the site should probably tell you most anything you need to know, but here's a repeat of the tagline:

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it.

Liberated Pixel Cup brings together some powerful allies: Creative Commons, Mozilla, OpenGameArt, the Free Software Foundation, and you.

In a sense, merely bringing together these organizations on a common purpose feels like a huge victory for me: they're organizations that really agree on a lot of things but simply don't seem to speak to each other much. But even more significantly it brings together several movements in a tangible way: games are by necessity an overlap of culture and functionality, and in this way free software and free culture are directly intertwined.

The art portion of the contest is now under-way, but there was a "pre-contest" part of the game in which we ended up working out a style guide and set of base assets. I really encourage you to check out the style guide, assets, and mini "demo game":

Anyway, Liberated Pixel Cup is kind of my baby (well, I guess so is MediaGoblin) and it's great to see it moving along so well. The art contest has kicked off and we're already seeing some awesome entries.

I have a lot more to say on Liberated Pixel Cup as to the what and why, but I think this blogpost is already getting a bit wrong, so you can read this interview with me about Liberated Pixel Cup on opensource.com instead. Hopefully I'll get to writing that a bit more soon. The rationale might not be 100% self-evident, but I'm hoping the awesomeness of things even so far is. :)

Moving and my relationship

Another thing going on in my life is actually really more about my spouse, Morgan. I'm happy to say that she finished her Masters program here at NIU and we'll soon be moving from teh Deklabbs to Madison (where Morgan will work on her PHD) in mid-August.

Not much to say on that other than that I'm very proud of Morgan. We also hit our three year anniversary recently, so that's awesome.

Other things

There are a few other things going on in life. I want to wrap up this blogpost so here's a quick rundown:

• I volunteered at PyCon on the video team again this year.
• I gave a bunch of MediaGoblin talks and ran a sprint and will be presenting at OSCON as well.
• Tube successfully met and beat out its kickstarter fundraising campaign! Okay... I'm not really involved in this anymore, but I'm proud of Bassam, Fateh, and crew. Before starting on MediaGoblin I was volunteering on some python scripting on this though, and there's a small shout-out to my scripting work in Bassam's Libre Graphics Meeting talk (webm version here). That's not trying to claim any sort of credit; my participation in Tube has honestly been minimal, but I'm proud to see it move forward.
• Interestingly enough I've been mentioned in the last couple of FaiF episodes; specifically my field guide to copyleft blogpost in Fontana's talk, and vaguely in the interview with Deb Nicholson of OIN (who is actually a MediaGoblin co-conspirator, and a great speaker, so you should listen to that episode), but mostly indicating that I'll be on in a future episode there. So, I guess that will happen.

I think there's more, but honestly I'm totally exhausted typing this all out, so I think that'll have to be it. But life over the last year has been a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. And the next year looks like it will be even more interesting, as you'll hear in the next couple of days... so keep your eye here.

We just made another release of GNU MediaGoblin: 0.3.0, "Rise of the RoboGoblins"! We've had "release artwork" for a while, ever since Jef van Schendel made the banner for our 0.0.3, "Talking in Rainbows" release, but recently I've been doing the artwork. The last few releases have come out with release artwork that is both more complex than my usual work, but also with results that I'm extremely proud of. In a certain sense, it's silly to spend so much time on release artwork. Sure, people seem to like it. But on the other hand, I probably could be coding. But my life has also been both at work and in hobby space more and more of "hacker management" work (as in, both doing programming as a hacker and managing projects that hackers work on) and it's nice to get some time in to do artwork for fun.

Anyway, several people have commented that they really like the artwork for this release, I've been meaning to write up a blogpost showing how I do artwork, and there are a couple of interesting aspects to the artwork in this release, so now seems like an opportune time to give a brief overview of the process.

First of all, materials. Excepting a minor bit of Blender assistance, I did everything in the GIMP for this release. I have an Intuos 2 wacom tablet that I use on my desktop, and I've used that as my primary art tool for almost a decade(!) now, but earlier this year I got a Thinkpad X220 laptop/tablet hybrid (with gorilla glass screen for scratch resistance while drawing; definitely recommended if you do much artwork on the go) and I do almost all my artwork on there these days. In fact, most of the artwork for this release was done from the car (Morgan was driving, of course).

I knew I wanted to go with the name "Rise of the RoboGoblins" for this release, both because I thought it fit in a very silly and abstract way, and because I knew I had some ideas for artwork that could go with it. I didn't have extremely specific ideas for the artwork, just that I wanted a group of robot goblins bravely standing around. So first step, figure out what those robots look like.

This is typically what my canvas looks like when I'm sketching out ideas. When I sketch for ideas I usually do a bunch of small drawings on a moderate/smallish canvas resolution. Fast and loose sketches, see what sticks. In this case, as I came up with robot designed I liked I moved them over to the side. I usually don't bother to clean up files like this very much. I use the pen tool for this, as I do for pretty much all my sketching and outlining.

Now that I knew what the characters looked like, I wanted to figure out where to place them. I had a pretty good idea of the character sizes based off of thinking bout the character sketches above, so I did a quick and rough sketch of things in an 800x600 canvas.

This looked pretty good to me, and I had a pretty decent sense of the composition and perspective. Yes, on its own, the above sketch looks like crap. But it isn't meant to be evaluated on its own; it's just a guide for me and me alone.

There's only one problem: I'm terrible at perspective. Or, that is, I can do perspective when it's just one object, but the moment I start to put a bunch of objects in a scene I start overworrying about the structure of perspective and tend to overcompensate. Luckily, I had a trick up my sleeve that I used in our previous release, 0.2.1, "Gearing Up":

Basically, taking a cue from the wonderful Blend & Paint training DVD, I made a minimal scene in Blender to figure out the perspective, then used that as a background layer to guide me in the shapes and perspective of my artwork. (Thanks to my good friend Lunpa for suggesting this technique probably would work with my artwork as well.) As you can see, the shapes are super, super basic in the blender scene. I don't need anything complex, I just need to know where things are. So, by that same principle, all I really needed was to line up some cubes on a plane with some simple three point lighting. So I did just that:

Now that we have that, it's just a simple matter of rendering that, scaling up our canvas on the perspective sketch image to three times what our end result will be (2400x1800 for an 800x600 scene), and adding the blender render as a layer for "guidance". I duplicate the "perspective sketch" layer, move things into place, and refine the sketches a bit so when I do the next draw-over it'll be a bit clearer where things go.

So now we have that, but the outlines are nowhere near what we want here; this is just guidance stuff still. I create a new layer to create another sketch with more details. At this point my desktop looks a bit like this:

At this point the details are shaping up pretty nicely. However, the middle-left character still looks a bit rough comparatively. So I do three things: make a new layer to draw final outlines over the sketchy but mostly correctly shaped outline ones, make a layer to block in color, and make a layer to go under that which I just paint white so we don't have accidental transparency in spots (I use a pressure sensitive pen and like a bit of the painterliness that comes from using an opacity-varying brush).

Once that's done, it's time to start shading things in (at this point we have colors, but they're pretty flat). Only one thing: I'd like to be able to have reasonably accurate ideas of where the shading could be. Luckily we already have a Blender scene set up for this, so I swap out the cubes for Suzanne (the Blender pseudo-mascot monkey) heads:

At this point, we're set to shade things in. Really, my method of shading is pretty lazy... I use a circle brush with the burn/dodge tool in the GIMP and "paint in" shadows and highlights with some cleanups and minor detail with the paintbrush and airbrush. The rest of the work is making the background (I used the plane from the blender scene with a conical gradient to give a bit more shadow moving toward the focal point) and some slight color adjustments with the curve tool. I sketch in the shadows at their feet using the pen tool and the cube scene for guidance, add the text, and I'm done!

So that's pretty much it! If you want to follow around or play with it, feel free to download the source XCF file. (To avoid ambiguity, it's CC BY-SA 3.0.) Not all my artwork is as intensive as this one is, but I'm very pleased with how it came out, anyway. Not bad for someone who doesn't have formal training, amirite?

And now, a minor tangent. One of the biggest joys of MediaGoblin development is really working with the incredible, incredible community of contributors and users we have. I've started a thing called contributor drawings to give thanks to people who have done a lot for the project. Sadly, I'm pretty slow at getting them done. But I was pretty pleased with the way this artwork came out... indeed, I tend to think it's some of the best artwork I've ever done. So now I want to take the opportunity to dedicate this piece to a particular community member... Jef van Schendel is our lead graphic designer and is responsible for MediaGoblin's primary look and feel. I felt it was appropriate to dedicate the piece I thought was the best of my artwork to the person responsible for MediaGoblin's design (and also the person who started the MediaGoblin release art tradition!) and I'm happy to say that Jef accepted this as his contributor drawing. Thanks for everything you've done, Jef! MediaGoblin wouldn't look nearly as awesome without you.

Today I heard about a family member being bullied and discriminated against for being an atheist. And at the moment, I am incredibly angry, incredibly furious. I don't think I was prepared to be so angry about this. I don't even think my life gave me an expectation or even much thought that this could happen to someone I loved. And so I am feeling a lot of anger that I don't know how to deal with, so I guess I will just write it out.

Let me step back for a moment. I am an atheist who was raised as a Christian. I came out as an atheist in early adulthood. I won't say my family was very happy about it, but I never faced any serious disrespect, and I haven't faced any discrimination about being an atheist in my lifetime. To be honest, after coming out, I never gave it too much thought. I mean, my father is even a religious teacher, and he was understanding about it. Granted, he is about the most liberal, tolerance-minded religion teacher possible; when I told him I was an atheist, and explained my thoughts behind things, he said something like "Well, that makes sense to me. I think you're approaching a belief system and ethics in your own way." Maybe that is why I unsusbcribed from the atheist subreddit; it seemed full of so many people who were just so angry at religious folks for their intolerance against atheists or for their simplemindedness or whatever. But I always thought of my father, a religious person who was willing to and even interested in talking about my beliefs and non-beliefs. My mother seemed a bit more disappointed, but she never changed her attitude to me, and she has always supported me and what I believe in. So that kind of bitterness that these other people held atainst non-atheists never resonated with me. It seemed absurd and reactionary.

And then today happened.

I don't use Facebook anymore, but Morgan occasionally tells me about things she sees on there. Today I heard about my cousin-in-law's son getting bullied and physically assulted for being an atheist. Worse yet, it seems he's been bullied and physically assulted for being an atheists by students at his public school and it seems at this point unlikely that anyone is going to get in trouble for it.

The short version of it goes like this. The kid goes on a camping trip for the fifth grade school outing. There's a campfire at night, and a group of boys sit around and tell ghost stories. One kid declares that there really are ghosts, but it's okay because if everyone around the campfire believes in Jesus, he will protect them from the ghosts, and that if anyone didn't believe in Jesus, they should leave the campfire so that they don't endanger the safety of the circle. So my cousin's kid gets up to leave the circle. The other boys notice. They chase after him. They begin calling him names, and shoving him around. (Apparently, they were forceful, but they didn't leave any marks. Regardless, that's physical assult. And as you can imagine, being a kid and shoved around and harassed by a group of other kids outdoors in the middle of the night has got to be a pretty scary experience.)

The school doesn't call up my cousin(-in-law) and tell her. I'm not sure if they didn't know, or if they didn't think it was important Anyway, my cousin doesn't know until her kid gets home from school. And of course he's scared.

They live in a very small, predominantly Christian town. She tells us that normally she tells her children that it is best to just not talk about their beliefs, and normally they do not. But of course, in this case the issue was forced: he was forced to either hold to his beliefs or lie about them. So he got up, and he walked away, as were the instructions of the other children. And then he was assulted and bullied.

We called Morgan's cousin on the phone. She tells us that of course, she is angry. But she also wonders if she should blame herself for "doing this to her children". But what has she done that any other parent does not do? She has passed on her beliefs from herself and her children. And in fact she has taught her children that even if they do not believe in other religions, they should understand them. Her children are not naive, and in fact they have read up on a lot of religions. But these beliefs, even these non-beliefs, are their beliefs. And that's their right. It isn't the first time her children have been bullied about such things either, but it is the first time the bullying has turned violent.

What can she do? She lives in a very small and predominantly Christian town. If she raises a fuss (which she might) the chance of the school doing anything is fairly small. And even if they do, she does that at risk of alienating her family from the rest of the community. And so what is she to do?

In a moment like this, it is easy to see why so many atheists seem angry much of the time. If the reverse had been true, with atheists beating up a Christian for believing in Jesus-the-savior, of course there would be recourse. There would be a mob. And thus, in retaliation of this hypocrisy, it is tempting in this moment to join the tribes of the angry atheists.

On the other hand, I think of my father, who I imagine would read this and be just as angry and upset as I am. And so it is not true that all Christians, in all communities, are this way. And if this happened in someplace larger and more diverse and more liberal... if this happened in Chicago, this would probably not be tolerated. And of course, this would be bad, just as bad, if it were discrimination in any other situation: whether the child were a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim. Any such discrimination is not okay. And certainly, many of the groups listed above probably face similar fears. It is likely that our cousin would also tell her children to not tell their schoolmates about their beliefs if their were Muslim. And so, part of the problem is simply something that is already generally known to be true: it can be a frightening thing to be a minority, any minority, in a small, tight-knit, and discriminatory community.

I do feel though that this action is likely to not be viewed with the same seriousness (or as the same act as) "religious discrimination" because by definition the religious belief expressed here is non-religious. And so I will not join the crowd of atheists who feel bitterly against all religious people. But today at least I have gained an understanding of how someone can come to develop those feelings. And I am certainly angry, and I feel very justified in being so.