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I'm up at the makerspace trying to get my life in order before we leave for Designercon 2026 in Las Vegas.
There is so much to do and I am unprepared for most of it.
I have untreated ADHD, with it's accompanying lack of executive function. This makes it very difficult for me to Get Started on things.
But, unlike a lot of my ADHD comrades, I also slip into hyperfocus with almost laughable ease once I've started a task (and can, at times, juggle three or four different things at once, to keep my brain stimulated enough to do them all.)
When I'm working, I get a monumental amount done in a fairly short period of time.
But getting started is hard.
I self medicate for this with a lot of caffeine and by leaving 10+ open tasks in various degrees of unfinished on any given day, and by overloading myself with goals.
Some days, looking at all the open, unfinished things is impossible, so I procrastinate by laying the groundwork for a new thing.
Some days, looking at the list of things I need to start is impossible, so I pick whatever of the open unfinished things catches my attention and I run with it.
This is why it seems like I'm always doing a million disparate things.
I am! Sort of, mostly.
They aren't actually disparate. They all weave together into a shared world view and form a statement of purpose and intent.
I am making media, and that includes toys and games and comics and cartoons and live action television, and music, and I am broadcasting and distributing that media, and that includes bookstores and television networks and radio stations and talking about random bullshit on the internet.
These things are One Thing.
In 2009, on my way home from the first vacation my wife and I took together, we discussed everything Disney does and what it would take to DIY Disney.
What does owning the means of production look like for a media empire?
We talked about this a lot. Every once in a while, I remember that it has shaped what I've done since then.
(an aside: that conversation hasn't shaped anything. that conversation was shaped by everything that came before it. I am just on the same road I've always been on.)
So what does it look like to have Communal Ownership of a media empire like Disney?
1) It looks like the creative commons CC-BY-SA license! Copyright is a broken, regressive system that I believe fundamentally robs people of the terrible joy of a shared folklore, and encapsulates that shared folklore into a commercial product to be sold to them.
Disney uses their own interpretations of copyright law and their enormous (in both senses) legal influence to serve, in this modern world, in a similar role to the Catholic Church in the renaissance.
Think about it!
So we reject them, we reject the church of the mouse, by creating our own works (and sharing them freely with one another.)
And yes, this gets very messy when every corporation on the planet is feeding everything everyone has ever made into the statistically averaging slop machine.
I understand why many people would not want to share freely in that world.
But the output of the statistically average slop machine is hot garbage. No matter how polished it gets, no matter how undetectable it gets, it will remain pathetic.
So I've decided that I don't care!
If the AI steals something I've produced, they are already in violation of the law (CC-BY-SA means that they have to 1) credit me, which they do not and 2) release their derivative work under the same terms, which they are legally prohibited from doing in the united states.)
If the law has already failed to protect me from the slop machine, that will not somehow turn me into a copyright maximalist.
My values still point me towards sharing and giving back, and CC-BY-SA lets me signal to the people who still respect one another that they are both allowed and encouraged to re-use my work, and sets the terms under which I would prefer for them to do it.
We must own our own folklore, pop-culture must belong to everyone.
That's why all the original characters we produce for @MountainTownToys are CC-BY-SA.
That's why our video games are CC-BY-SA, that's why our comics and our podcasts and our TV shows and our fiction are CC-BY-SA
(And, let me be clear, I'm not working under the misapprehension that something I make is likely to *become* folklore or pop-culture. I don't really even *want* that.
But I want whatever does become popculture and modern folklore to be free to reinterpret and reshape, so I make sure what I create is too.)
I will not remove that signal. I will not make another choice. I will not let my fear or anger towards the slop machine prevent me from taking a loud stance in favor of collaboration and shared creativity.
(I understand that you might feel differently. I'm not interested in arguing with you about it. You do what you feel you must. If your anger or fear drives you to another choice, I am not going to judge you for it. If your cold logic drives you to another choice, I think that's great. I just don't want to talk about it.)
I had several other points to make about Disney and communal ownership, but the rest of them get pretty theoretical and start to miss the point so instead I'll refocus:
We, each of us who can access this network, have the ability to produce and distribute media at a quality and scale that was unimaginable for consumers in 1990 (and was hard to believe in 2000, and that was possible but slightly more expensive in 2010.)
In my pocket right now I have a cell phone running android that has a better camera on it than any television studio had prior to about 25 years ago, and at least as good as what most television studios were using in the 00s and into the 10s.
(This is perhaps an overstatement. It is a worse camera in several meaningful respects: It has a smaller sensor, but that sensor is significantly more sensitive. It has a worse lens, but not *that much worse* aside from the size. But it can be made to produce footage that looks as good or better than any non-film camera used in television production prior to the mid 2010s, and most since then.)
So I (and most of us) have a camera that produces an image that's as good as or better than the cameras used for most TV production for most of the history of television in our pockets all the time.
And that camera is also a full production studio, capable of running a full NLE (I do it all the time, and I bet you do too), capable of broadcasting live to any number of platforms, wirelessly, from anywhere (Edison Carter eat your heart out.)
Nearly everyone on this network has a device that matches the above,
According to Pew research, 91% of US adults have a smartphone.
And yes, not all smartphone cameras are created equally, but I would argue (and in fact I *am* arguing) that it's better to produce the thing using whatever tools are available than it is to wait until you have better equipment.
Any laptop made within the last ... 15 years is probably capable enough to run a modern linux distribution (this is not the place to complain about linux) and a video editor like kdenlive and, having done so, it becomes as capable or more capable than basically any television studio prior to the proliferation of NLE.
A single decade old laptop (one that can still be reliably picked up on the used market for $100 or so) can reliably be used to produce *and distribute* film and television, as long as you have access to a decent camera (and you probably do!)
When I start ranting about this stuff, it's useful to remember that the 2019 film Parasite was edited by Yang Jin-mo on a mac running Final Cut Pro 7.
Final Cut Pro 7 was released in 2009 and stopped receving updates in 2011, and won't run on versions of Mac OS newer than OS X Yosemite (released in 2014, updates ended in 2017)
That means Jin-Mo was almost certainly using a laptop from 2015 or earlier to edit the 2020 best picture winner.
and, while new codecs and file formats have been released since then, Final Cut Pro 7 running on a 2015 macbook is just as capable of editing in 2026 as it was in 2019.
The other thing that people like to point out when I start talking about using cellphones for making movies is that cameras with better lenses and bigger sensors and manual controls produce noticeably better results and *that's true* but it doesn't matter!
Acclaimed Hollywood director Steven Soderberg released Unsane in 2018, and it was shot entirely on iphone 7s running a fancy camera app called Filmic Pro.
It looks like the current version of Filmic Pro has been fully enshitified in some kind of nasty subscription model, but there are a couple of replacements out there (that I have not personally evaluated, so I will not comment beyond that.)
Most modern android phones have sensors that are at least as good was what was in the iPhone 7, and the iPhone 7 was good enough for a theatrical release.
(It's probably also worth noting at this time that, at least as recently as 2020 basically nothing was actually edited in 4k outside of some youtube stuff!
All the major marvel movies and the big budget hollywood releases were edited and had their special effects done at 1080p and then were UPSCALED for their theatrical and UHD disc release!
It was good enough for Attack of the Clones, it was good enough for The Avengers, it's good enough for you!)
Damn it, now I'm going to talk about the TAMI show
The TAMI Show was a concert film released in 1964, it's one of a couple of films that meet the criteria I'm about to discuss, but it is the one who's name I remember, so it's the one we're going to talk about.
You can watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnFbkV17O08
or read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
But, in both cases, you will probably not notice the thing that is important to this discussion, so bare with me.
The T.A.M.I Show Full (HD)
YouTube
The TAMI show was shot in "ELECTRONOVISION."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronovision
Electronovision was a fancy way of saying that they shot it on high end French video cameras, designed for France's early HD television channel.
Yes, France had HDTV decades before the rest of the world, I've written about this before ( https://ajroach42.com/high-definition-television-in-1949/ )
So some dudes got together and realized that they could produce a movie way more cheaply by shooting it on video cameras, editing it on tape, and then filming a TV screen with a 16mm camera when the whole thing was done.
The produced, basically, a 720i video that they filmed and screen in theaters.
No one complained about the picture quality, some folks even praised it.
One more example
28 days later, an award winning major motion picture, was shot on the Cannon XL1.
The Cannon XL1 is a Standard Definition DV camera.
As far as consumer video cameras go, it was about as nice as they get, with 3 CCDs and interchangeable lenses. It was used by a lot of public access television studios and even some professional television productions.
But it's a standard definition camera, shooting at 480p.
28 days later was released in theaters in 2002 (which means it was released in theaters on film), they just blew it up optically. It's just a regular television 480p image being projected at movie theater screen size.
And you can absolutely tell, and it absolutely does not matter.
We've been releasing movies made on television cameras to theaters for more than 60 years.
Your smartphone produces a better image than a 60 year old television camera.
You can make a movie.
In 2002, a movie made with television cameras and released to theaters won a bunch of awards.
Your smartphone probably produces a better image than a 2002 television camera (and, even if it doesn't, you can get a camera that does for under $200.)
You can make a movie.
In 2019, a major Hollywood director just started shooting movies on iPhone 7s.
Stastically, you probably have a camera as good or better than an iPhone 7 in your pocket or in your hand as you're reading this.
You can make a movie.
Alright I'm done. I'm not ranting anymore about disney or hollywood or television.
I have shit to do (and that is making some short videos to advertise the things I do on a small television at designercon.)
(This is what it's like inside my head all the time. This is how I got started today.)
Alright, I made one commercial, and now I'm editing a website to match it:
We've been working on some Space Corps/Jupiter's Ghost stuff behind the scenes. None of it is ready to release yet, but it's coming along nicely.
It's probably too early for me to be blasting the website out to people again, but I'm going to be in front of an entirely new audience and a bunch of fascists own star trek so like...
I'm wide awake, it's morning.