It would be wrong to say that I am in some sort of mental malaise, but I am in the kind of mindset where it can be hard to actualize anything, to use corporate-speak, except those things that are sort of immediately needed. Case in point, I owe you all a follow-up to my blog post about Wrong Turns 6, 1, and 2, featuring 3, 4, and 5. I didn't watch those for my health, nor exactly my enjoyment. Speaking of horror-movies-most-people-look-away-from, I've also recently watched the 2014-or-so Beneath and the 2005-or-so Venom, both sporting something like 1.5 stars on Netflix, and I kind of want to talk about them, too, but not right now, besides to say that I enjoyed the first half of both films more than the last half of either, which I think is significant since this seems to be a trend.
This past Tuesday, I had an event/talk: "The Left Side of Copy[right]", which talked about copyleft and some of the issues of copyright. It went ok. I didn't pack the room but the people there had good questions, good follow-up questions the next day or two, and people who have read the notes afterward have been interested. That link, there, can take you to a post on the library blog about it (by me) where you can see the whole thing. Well, the parts that are on the Prezi. I might try giving it again, or turning it into videos, something like that, because I think part of the reason that more people didn't turn up is because I'm not sure if people quite understand what it means. Some of the pre-talk feedback I got gave me the impression that people thought I was promoting piracy or that it was just a talk about copyright in general. If you do not know what copyleft is, take a look at the talk. Or maybe read the Wikipedia page. It's good stuff.
Speaking of which, I have a talk coming up towards the end of the month: Welcome to the Future History of the Book. That flyer, above, is one of the promotions for it. It's sort of slightly smart-assed, but the talk will deal simultaneously with the question of what constitutes a book and how does the book—whatever that mean—fit into the history and future of information technology. I'm generally going to bring up the fact that the book will probably be here for centuries, but that elements of "bookness" will likely change if the book industry is to survive. If you are interested, feel free to attend. If you know anyone else who might be, feel free to send them that link or that flyer.
Finally, looping back around to copyleft, I have been debating the Creative Commons license for my site. I have been CC-BY-SA 3.0 for a bit. I'm going to go ahead and switch up to the 4.0 soon (at least for newer stuff). I just can't decide if I want to keep the -SA (aka, the share-alike clause, meaning that people who use my stuff through the Creative Commons license must also release their stuff through Creative Commons or a compatible license). I'm not exactly a fan of viral free culture—feels a little like having a charity that forces people to join a church—but at the same time, I understand the history and philosophy of it. Even more so, now that I have spent a few weeks reading the old debates. Any thoughts? I'll make my decision probably this weekend, but would be curious to hear feedback.