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Campaign for Halloween on the Weekend

Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year. Friend-of-Stay Free! Heidi Cody considers this unacceptable.  No time to make costumes. Should the parties have already happened or will they take place this weekend? No daylight trick-or-treating because the folks with the candy are still working.

But Heidi isn't one to let a problem go unsolved, so she has formed the Campaign for Halloween On the Weekend. She is proposing that the federal government move Halloween from October 31 to the Last Saturday in October so that we can avoid the blight of a mid-week holiday.

I can't support this idea enough. Go to the C.H.O.W. website to find out more.

Fun Tools for Reclaiming Public Space

Design Camouflage

Speaking of pranks, while at the OpenLab I wrote some step-by-step instructions on how to mimic corporate and government signage on the site instructables.  The guide outlines the most current methods to match fonts, colors, and layouts to make your new signs look as legitimate as possible.  Combined with the Billboard Liberation Front's classic manual, the Art and Science of Billboard Improvement and some basic computer image and vector editing skills, anyone should be able to alter signs or create their own.  All that's left is your own motivation and message. 

DIY Budget Gallery

Imagine attending a great garage sale, art opening, and block party all on one city sidewalk.  Between 2000-2005 I ran an outdoor guerilla art gallery in San Francisco, called the Budget Gallery where we would set up gallery style shows in high-traffic, "underutilized" public spaces like vacant lots and chain link fences.  All the art was sold on the honor system and was generally very cheap.  With a mailing list of over 700 people, they were very well attended by both followers of the gallery as well as passersby. 

The Budget Gallery was always meant to be a sort of "open source franchise" and a how-to guide was well overdue.  I was in an instruction writing mood, so I created DIY Budget Gallery - a wiki that explains how to organize these street-level art show/interventions.  You can use the information to create a Budget Gallery, or piecemeal for a related project.

The Latest from the Anti-Advertising Agency

A few highlights from the Anti-Advertising Agency blog:

Ad Free Blog and Google's AdSense Makes No Sense
A recent Reuters story confirmed a suspicion of mine. Most people don’t make money advertising on their blogs.

Protect Your Right to be Spammed!
The Direct Mail industry fights to protect direct mail through a direct mail campaign.  Sleazy.

Boston Boots Musicians for Marketing Messages
Boston's Subway, the T-Line, is bringing in audio "advertainment" into it's subway platforms and trains, and kicking out live musicians.  And they want to know what you think about it.

Golden Gate Billboard
Paul S. talks about using advertising dollars to pay for what taxes should -- and how it doesn't work.

Pay Phones Turned Mini-Billboards With the saturation of cell phones, who uses pay phones in New York?  Drug dealers and advertisers.

What I did this summer...

My last post on the Stay Free blog was over 2 months ago. Yikes. I have reappeared. This summer has been a busy one. I'll be posting more in the coming days but one of the things I did this summer was close all the McDonalds in Manhattan (with some help)...

Our prank is easily repeatable and the script and other resources are on my site under Ronald's Crisis..

P.S. I posted this on YouTube yesterday - my first video on YouTube - and within two hours got my favorite comment ever: "fake"

The Church of Ticketmaster

My friend was searching for tickets to Cavestomp and came across this captcha:

As he put it, "even the church wouldn't tack a $9 surcharge on top of a $35 ticket purchase..."

Thanks M*I*K*E

A kinder, gentler assertion of rights

A recent article about my neighborhood in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had a very forward-thinking copyright notice at the end.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007 All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law. Just a reminder, though -- It's not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph, (40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article.

It strikes me as a really genteel way of merging social convention with copyright law in a way that acknowledges fair use and the rights of the original author. If your magazine goes behind a pay-wall, though, I'm still posting the whole thing.

And I apologize to the good folks at the BDE for posting the whole copyright notice.

A