The Crackstarter campaign begins. Apparently there are six different campaigns currently seeking funding. Work together, people!

Holy shit. Also, a story in The Star about it. (via)

Judge Dredd should broker the peace treaty.

Matthew Yglesias goes deep. “A bunch of friendly folks using advanced technology to help people? That can only be profitable, I suspect, on the small screen.” (via) Also, read this beautiful comment about how Trek helped a troubled kid.

Interesting experiment in iOS film delivery:

Veteran storyteller Neal Edelstein has reinvented filmmaking in a way that brings the power of hypnotic, episodic content to the iTunes Store. Viewed exclusively on the iPhone and iPad, this frighteningly haunting story is released in sporadic and unexpected ways that will leave you constantly guessing, and constantly engaged. You’ll want to activate Push Notifications so you won’t miss a thing. (via)

3D printers can already print crappy guns and soon will be able to print excellent ones. Does this mean the ownership of 3D printers should be regulated as stringently (or non-stringently in the US) as guns? The problem is made confusing, as Cascio points out, by the printers’ potential to self-replicate:

Any 3D printer able to produce a high-quality firearm would almost certainly be able to print out another 3D printer, this time without the restrictions. This is by no means an outrageous or speculative proposition. Among the earliest-available low-cost 3D printers was (and is) the RepRap — the Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (an older term for 3D printer).

Mad Men’s Don Draper problem:

As the island was to “Lost,” Don Draper is to “Mad Men.” He was a great premise, a mystery we were dying to understand. But, the more the puzzle has been filled in, the more he’s begun to feel suspiciously like a symbol, a thesis title rather than a character: “Appearance Versus Reality”; “American Masculinity as Performance”; “The Links Between Prostitution, Marriage, and the Ad Game.”

I think the problem for many people is that Draper is no longer someone you can root for. It’s similar to Walter White’s arc in Breaking Bad – kind of the whole point of the show, yet out of sync with what many viewers expect of their protagonists.

This year’s upfronts seem more significant than most. (via)

But there’s an air of urgency for the suits at the legacy networks — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. They’ve been rocked by an ominous first: A basic cable program — AMC’s zombie apocalypse drama “The Walking Dead” — outperformed every scripted show on television this season in the advertiser-coveted 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

A well-reasoned piece on the recent news that Adobe’s Creative Suite is becoming Creative Cloud, a subscription service.

Absent in most of the opinions I’ve read on this matter is any weighing of competitive products. Certainly Photoshop has low-priced, excellent competition on the App Store (Acorn, Pixelmator). But other products like After Effects and Lightroom have few competitors. Kind of a crappy dilemma, especially for occasional or hobbyist users.

On learning of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweet that Breaking Bad taught him how to dispose of a corpse: “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Oh, Jesus Christ. No, I did not know that.”

Some issues to consider going into the US upfronts, which are happening this week. While watching some of the trailers from the NBC presentation I realized I probably shouldn’t care too much about this stuff since I don’t actually watch any network shows anymore – strictly cable, baby.

On the effect technology (the internet, DNA testing) is having on genealogy.

“Raza, now a law-school graduate from McGill, said he was driven to speak out by the recent spate of high-profile cases of cyberbullying, some of which have pushed their victims to commit suicide. If the same situation were to happen today, he said he hopes school authorities would help him through it.” Good on him. (via)

On Eric Fensler’s GI Joe PSAs, which led him to work for Tim & Eric.

“Does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit”

Well, maybe you SHOULDN’T read that big article I wrote. I actually agree in principle (mystery is good, plus great art tends to be open to many interpretations), but I think figuring out the ins and outs of the plot is worth doing, for critics or whomever. Half of the fun of movies that make you work hard is doing the work.

More Upstream Color links: a FAQ, an interview with Carruth in which he is surprisingly expository.