Well that was an interesting experience. Yesterday, we joined thousands of sites in what was apparently the largest Web blackout protest in history to oppose two very dangerous bills in the US Congress: the “PROTECT-IP Act” (PIPA) in the Senate and “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) in the House of Representatives. This seems to have had a useful effect, as a dozen or so people in Congress have reversed their position, and Obama’s administration released a statement in opposition to the bills. So now we’re back to the business of making new media content work!
Just quick note today: We’ll be joining the blackout protest against the SOPA / PIPA legislation tomorrow (Jan 18th), along with Reddit, Wikipedia, and many other sites.
Even Google will be doing something about it, as I understand it. This legislation could be extremely devastating to us, as it targets many of the people who we rely on as distributors, and of course, on viewers. Furthermore, it is unnecessary to create legislation like this as the threat of so-called “piracy” is vastly overblown.
Well, the holidays went well, and now it’s back to work. This week, I’ve spent on defining the spec for the model and design sheets to get Daniel started, and also working on some additional reference research on Soyuz to support modeling the Soyuz re-entry (and ascent) module which we’re going to need for an early animation test.
Posters I got the concept art posters back from the printers today, and they look really nice. As I mentioned earlier, I printed enough for all backers, because they really didn’t cost much after the first 10 or so which were already spoken for. So, if you’ve received a survey notice, be sure to fill in your address so I can send you the poster. For those of you who selected “no reward”, I sent out a regular email — I’d still like to send you a poster. Just email me (i.e. at “digitante at gmail dot com”) an address to which you’d like me to send it.
Thanks to the support of some very generous backers, we are now able to commission Daniel Fu for the character design artwork. Work will start in January!
I wrote a column for Free Software Magazine about the free software infrastructure I set up on our server to support Lunatics. You might find it interesting: Creating a Project Website for “Lunatics” with Apache, Zope, Plone, MediaWiki, Trac, Subversion, and the Cloud Too
Hello everybody! Today, I started work on following through with the posters (the “Concept Art” posters). I’ve queried our two logo sponsors and received a logo from one of them. I also checked the cost of the poster printing. I’ve also had a chance to run over the final numbers and make sure that the overheads have all been accounted for. It turns out that when all the costs and overheads are calculated, we have about $1836, which is very nice: that will cover not only the $1600 for Daniel, but $100 incentive for Rosalyn on the script writing work, and still leave a bit for contingencies.
Wow! That was really, really exciting! May all of our cliff-hangers be this good. We cleared 100% with just 8 MINUTES to spare thanks to some last minute heroics from some of you — you know who you are. Thank you and Happy Holidarys! (I will post again tomorrow after I get some sleep). Terry Hancock
Well, we’re at 80% with just over 3 HOURS left to go. It’s just possible that something amazing could happen to get us through the next $475 of fund-raising. If any of you have got friends waffling over pledging, this is the LAST CHANCE to get those in. I want to say thank you to all the new backers, to the old backers who’ve stuck with us, and to the few who raised their pledges in the last few hours to get us this close to our goal. And I’d especially like to thank The Luna Project ( http://lunarcc.org ) for backing us with a $200 organizational logo sponsorship earlier today.
