Month: April 2003

My friend Micheline Lewis is helping to organize an event called The Seed Money Show. It’s a fundraiser for the Toronto Public Space Committee, a group of people whose mission is to “to democratise our public spaces which have become dominated by automobiles, advertising and private interest.” In a time when public space is becoming increasingly corporatized, it’s nice to see that these guys are fighting the good fight.

They’re raising money for a new magazine to be launched in June, and to that end they’re having a night at Sneaky Dee’s tomorrow — Wednesday, April 30th — and Micheline promised “lots of cute girl bands for only five bucks.”

A good cause and cute girl bands? Sign me up!

AltaMira wrote to me about Fetish Cares, an upcoming fundraiser for AIDS in the same vein as Accordion City’s long-standing event Fashion Cares. Like Fashion Cares, all the proceeds from this event go to ACT, the AIDS Committee of Toronto. Unlike Fashion Cares, the fashions shown are decidely more “underground”, being of the fetish variety: leather, neoprene rubber, PVC and the like, often in body-accentuating, sexy cuts. No fashion show is complete without music, and Fetish Cares will feature V.A.S.T., The Birthday Massacre and More Machine Than Man.

Sometimes, during the course of creating events such as this, nasty personal politics rears its ugly head. A few people have claimed that the money from Fetish Cares will be lining someone’s pockets and not going to ACT. This is not so. If it were, ACT — who have rigourous screening and accounting processes for charitable events held in their name — wouldn’t lend their name to the event. Some people seem to be concerned that a for-profit company, Seventh Circle Entertainment, is helping organize the event. Seventh Circle isn’t making any money from this — in fact, they’re taking a loss. They’re doing this for two perfectly good reasons: as a way of promoting themselves and because they believe in the cause. In business circles, this is what we can a “win-win situation”, folks.

For more details, check out the Fetish Cares site, as well as the LiveJournal of maniacaljonny, one of the people behind the show.

This one’s for the graphic designers and trademark aficionados out there.

My friend Dave Hall from The Gentleman Loser (a very small mailing list for a circle of tech-savvy friends, named by my suggestion after the “console cowboy” bar from William Gibson’s “Sprawl” series; Gibson in turn got the name from the chorus of Steely Dan’s Midnite Cruiser) informs me of the existence of Logotype Free, a russian site containing over 70,000 corporate logos in Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW! formats.

Dave says that Logotype Free “does for logos what IMDB.com did for movies”. I suspect that a number of legal departments of companies whose logos appear there might disagree.

Additional reading

Check out this really cool graph depicting the relationships between major characters in Gibson’s “Sprawl” series.

It’s a lovely and sunny spring day in Accordion City, so I’m running outside to play. I’ll come back with pictures.

This pair of photos is a long time coming. Matt “Black Belt” Jones, International Man of User Experience, came to visit Accordion City a few weeks ago, we took him out on Queen Street West. At long last, I’m finally posting the photos as promised.

I gave New Girl the electronic obscurity treatment so when you finally see her being chased and tackled on Cops, you’ll recognize her.

Matt, do you always scowl for the camera?

Earlier this week, Jonathon “Dishmatique” Delacour sent out an email message to everyone on Shelley “BurningBird” Powers’ blogroll. Shelley’s popular blog, BurningBird, consumes about 12 gigabytes of bandwidth every month — something I’ve only been able to do once, as a result of the New Girl story — and that’s not cheap.

Shelley’s finances have taken a beating this year, and she’s had to think about cutting back on non-essential expenses, which include webhosting. I think losing BurningBird would be terrible: it’s a terrific blog for matters both technical and personal, and she’s been quite an influence on my writing. Her blogger webring — Bloggers with Attitude — was the first one to accept me into its fold, and she’s been nothing but encouraging to me. Finally, without Shelley, we’d lose a rare female voice in the world of technology, a world that really could use a good deal more.

I know what it’s like to have your finances drained through unemployment and deadbeats. I’ve been lucky. Thanks to a little help from the folks, living in Canada (it’s better to be rich in the U.S., but it’s better to be poor in Canada), the “Save Joey’s Christmas” sale and for a short while, the accordion actually covering my groceries, I’ve been able to get by without giving up less essential things like internet hosting.

(A good thing, too, because BLOGS SAVE LIVES!)

Jonathon’s set up a PayPal fund for Shelley. As a way of spreading the grace/karma/good mojo around, I donated the $20 I made from a kind stranger as thanks for playing the Hokey Pokey for a little girl to Shelley. I know Shelley well enough to know that someday, she’s going to pass it along too. If you’re a reader of BurningBird, how ’bout throwing a little extra cash Shelley’s way? Just click on the logo below: