Tonight I was chillin’ at home in a Battlegrounds queue when my phone rang. It was my friend Robert. He’d just passed a liquor store with an Ecto-1 parked outside. Dan Aykroyd was inside, selling and signing bottles of Crystal Head Vodka. “I would leave, like, now,” he advised. I checked the website — it was legit and going until 8pm. It was 7:30. “Can you get in your uniform that fast?” asked Kat. “Of course I can — I’m a Ghostbuster!” And I am not kidding — I said it with a straight face and no sense of the ridiculous nature dawned on me. I meant it. In retrospect, I am a little scared for myself.

We grabbed the photo. We grabbed my wallet. We found Kat’s wallet. We figured out how to get there — it was ten minutes away, which in LA is potentially 40 minutes, but we showed up just in time. Ecto-1 outside. Signs everywhere. My pack broke; I had to do emergency surgery. The guys at the store were waving me in from across the street, saying “C’mon! You’re gonna be the last one, but you gotta get in here!”

Photo? Wallet? At home. Didn’t grab them after all. But Kat had her Nikon.

Dan Aykroyd is one of the reasons I love comedy. His sense for the absurd, his fearlessness — you watch those early SNLs and it’s amazing. Sneakers, Grosse Pointe Blank,Dragnet…and oh yeah, he created Ghostbusters. Ray has always been my favorite character — the smart believer, the relentlessly positive one, “the heart of the Ghostbusters.”  I built ecto goggles to go with the outfit because Ray had them.

I bought a bottle of the vodka for him to sign, of course.

It says “Dan — Report all ghosts! Dan Aykroyd — ‘Ray’”

I posed for a few photos with the Ecto-1 and a few people who wanted their photo taken with me, and then we headed home.

Two down, two to go. Well, I did get to interview Harold Ramis when I was at OXM, so I suppose that counts for something. I have now made contact with three GBs, even if I only have one signature on that darn photo.

Now excuse me, I have to drink booze from a skull.

Palette-Swap Ninja – “Arcade Gaming Shrine”

Please envision this FUCK YOU in much larger letters, possibly blinking.

So we got one and I realized, hey, this thing streams from either the internet or your home network — install server software on as many PCs or Macs as you like, and the Squeezebox seeks them out, even prioritizing iTunes so you can use the same playlists. We can use this to listen to our “bedtime stories” — old radio dramas that we’ve burned to MP3 CDs and run off a boombox with a sleep timer. And we’ve got this Mac Mini that’s just sitting on the network as a poor-man’s NAS box for data; why not load it up with a big iTunes library of old-time radio MP3s and do that? That will make things simple…right?

But there’s always a problem. Here’s the domino effect that took up most of my day. The Mac Mini has been wireless only; I hate wi-fi, but it wouldn’t play nice with my network any other way, so I figured, at least it’s connected (most of the time — I swear a string of vulgarity every time it drops wireless during a file transfer). I fiddled with it and, lo and behold, it likes the wired router now. OK, so I’ll wire it up, and the streaming will be faster and more reliable.

To do that I have to move it. The wireless access point is only a four-port wired router, and that’s taken up by the main Macs and two PCs. To get all the other devices online (namely my game consoles on the other side of the room) I ran one port around to an ancient MaxGate 7-port router. It was built in 2000 and I don’t have the manual; it was a gift from the free table at work, no doubt a castoff from Maximum PC. But somehow, ages ago, I figured out how to disable its DHCP so it would just be a switch, not a router. I move the Mini to that side of the room, wire it up, plug it into the MaxGate…nothing.

A half-hour is spent simply trying to get into the MaxGate’s admin menu. The Mini doesn’t have its own monitor (I usually go in via shared screen on another Mac), so I have to unplug the Xbox 360 from the VGA port on my gaming HDTV, steal a mouse from another computer, find the spare Mac keyboard…then I finally get it right. The Squeezebox now sees the Mini, and the Mini is wired. Awesome. I put everything away and reconnect the 360. I wanted to play games today and I’m running out of day.

The 360 can’t find the network any more. The router won’t pass along an IP address. I guess I screwed up somewhere in the MaxGate’s menus. I search the internet; I swap to Manual settings and back again; I fiddle with cables. I connect the Mini to the TV again. Another 20 minutes goes by. I get into the MaxGate’s menus again with my PC laptop, click “save” on a setting that I haven’t changed…and everything goes black on the Mini.

I swap cables around. It comes back to life 10 minutes later. Everything is fine. Except I want to punch each and every piece of equipment in this asinine chain. But the upside is, I can wake up and listen to Sarah and Vinnie again. Also, hopefully th

I think I am going to play a fighting game. Or a shooting game. Or a PC Load Letter game.

I can’t wait to figure out how to get video to stream from my PC to my PS3.

Go check out OneOfSwords and it will make me happy. Kat designed the site and I think she did a great job. Poke around; you’ll see the origin of the name in the About section.

And if you follow OneOfSwords on Twitter by this Friday, you’re eligible to win some cool prizes. What good is working at a big games publisher if you can’t give out some swag?

Please tell every living creature you know. If telling people about this promotional event is a point of introduction for you to meet new living creatures, all the better.

Aside from getting lost to and from (and within) the office a few times, most of week one was spent getting up to speed on what this year’s games are, where they are in development, when I’ll be able to start interviewing the developers, stuff like that. I also got most of my equipment for the podcasting and video work. I had a solid budget and I was able to get some real pro-level gear that will last me several years, but now I have to learn how to use it all correctly. Being a geek a certain amount comes naturally, but still — this is my job now, and I would like to be good at it.

I also locked down a lot of brand/identity things for the project. Site’s not ready yet, but it’ll be designed this weekend. Just waiting on some domains to be pointed to the right servers, and then we’re off to the races.

Meanwhile, the blurring of the lines between my life and my job have already begun. A few weeks back when I was in LA looking for a place, I posted a photo of my cubicle-to-be. It was full of boxes, review copies of Tony Hawk: Ride, about to go out to the press. I thought that my base of operations was mere storage was funny so I shared it. Someone (who received one of those copies, no less) saw fit to say “look at all the unsold copies LOL EYERONEE” and it was amply retweeted.

Today, I posted a photo of a piece of cheesecake. Kat and I went to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch, nothing more than that, and the presentation of dessert was awesome, so I snapped a pic and sent it out on Twitter. A different joker responded “boy they paid you off fast.” Not paid, as in “you have a new job and probably more money to afford such extravagant sweets” — but paid off.  As if…my career as a community guy was sealed by taking delectable cheesecake bribes? That’s not only insulting, it’s irrational. And, I gotta add, not funny. I can take a joke, but don’t forget the, you know, humor.

I knew I would have to steel myself for people taking any possible opportunity to intentionally twist entirely innocent things into self-righteous corporate commentary. I accepted that before I accepted the job. But I thought it would not start happening until I was actually doing some public speaking, maybe even having said something that people could disagree with and rib me about. But a picture of dessert and a pile of boxes? I guess the steeling is still underway.

Despite dedicating my life to being clear and honest, now I have to be ready for everything I say or do to be intentionally misconstrued.

Zazzle, I always liked you. You saw what a lousy job CafePress was doing with on-demand one-off publishing, like hats and mugs and shirts, and said, “Hell, we can do that, and we can do it better.” So you took their business plan and ran with it and it was good (and it led to copyrighted banner images like the above, which are the exclusive property of Zazzle and not me). Besides, I like supporting San Francisco businesses, even if they don’t have original ideas.

For years I bought pre-made calendars features photos of guitars I would never own. Last year,as a personalized Christmas gift, Kat made me a Zazzle calendar of all the guitars I already own. I put it on my wall at work and got lots of compliments from people who liked the photography and thought it was a sweet thing for a wife to do for their crazy husband. As you can see, it was very nice.

Right after it was made, we had a major hard drive crash and all those guitar photos were lost. This summer, Kat re-shot the entire collection and promised to do a 2010 calendar with the new photos. They came out great. We spent three hours going over what photos we liked, which ones should go where, and how I wanted it to look. We uploaded it to Zazzle and ordered two for ourselves. It was immediately listed on Zazzle’s site.

Zazzle’s automatic robot wrote back and said our order was canceled for copyright reasons. That is defined with a bit more clarity here but I still do not understand what part of that calendar is violating someone’s copyright; it was a generic rejection letter and did not address the specifics of the work in question.

I thought it might be a mistake over the holidays, so I ordered it again. Same thing.

I’m confused. These are the guitars that I own; these are her photos. Remember the whole banner ad at the top of the blog post? “Your Photo Here,” “Your Design Here”? Who is claiming copyright on a project that we created?

Eventually one of the human Zazzle robots wrote back and said the following:

The Fender logo/concept is the protected intellectual property of Fender Guitars and may not be used on Zazzle products without permission, regardless of who the original artist or photographer may be. We are sorry for any inconveniences this may have caused.

The email noted that “If this issue is not resolved to your satisfaction, you may reopen it within the next 0 days.”

Now, I do not even know what a “logo/concept” is, but it isn’t something I buy strings for and tune and play on a regular basis. You can see the Fender logo as part of the February collage of Strat photos (as you could last year, on the calendar they printed without question), but the “Fender logo/concept” certainly isn’t the point of this calendar.  (Plus, who is “Fender Guitars”? That’s not even the name of the company — an important detail if you’re going to cite legal concerns, I’d think.)

So this immediately led to several questions in my head.

Q: Does this mean you can’t make anything with Fender products on it at Zazzle?
A: No, as there are dozens of products that do exactly that. Try searching Zazzle for “fender guitar” or even the more specific “fender stratocaster” and you will see for yourself.  (By the way, nothing comes up if you search for “fender logo/concept”.)

Now, maybe — maybe — all those products are in the same boat, and you cannot actually buy any of them; maybe if you try, your order gets canceled like ours did.

Q: If all those products exist but you can’t buy them, why are they still showing up on the site?
A: This is my biggest and most crucial question right now, and I don’t know the answer. Maybe Zazzle is simply inflating its search results to claim some sort of “thousands of items available” marketing line? Clearly, you can see the calendar we created; you can even attempt to order it. But you can’t actually buy it. It both exists as an item for sale and does not exist as an item for sale; it’s Shroedinger’s Calendar.

If you sell the item, list the item. If you don’t sell the item, remove the item. But by listing products that do not exist, Zazzle is getting positive associations with products they do not sell. How is that fair?

Here’s another head-scratcher: If the robo-rejector is smart enough to see something Fender in there, why doesn’t it nuke it at first upload? And why does Zazzle put its watermark over the pictures of Fender’s guitars?

Q: Zazzle’s blaming Fender. But can Fender really tell you not to do anything with your photos of their products?
A: If we were doing something malicious or misrepresentative — like saying “Fender Sucks” across a t-shirt with a Fender guitar on it – I could understand the rejection. But this was clearly not one of those instances; you can see for yourself if you flip through the digital preview of the calendar.

Q: But Fender still owns the Stratocaster shape.
A: And I’m not claiming ownership of that; I’m saying these are my photos of my property. Last time I checked, once I brought the guitar home, it was mine to do with as I saw fit, and no longer Fender’s problem. The warranty on my 1988 Fender Stratocaster expired a long time ago.  If they want to claim some partial ownership of my Stratocaster, they can send someone over to give me a free setup and change the strings. But they don’t act like a baby daddy should, so I figure they are out of the picture. (And if they are going to claim ownership, they’ll be pretty pissed about all the mods I did to the July guitar without their knowledge.)

More importantly…did Fender actually chime in and complain? Did Fender see this calendar and deem it a copyright violation? Or is Zazzle just robo-reacting to a potential issue? I’m guessing the latter, since because when we uploaded the totally-owned Palette-Swap Ninja logos and artwork for our band t-shirts, we were also asked, “Do you really own the copyright on this?” Um, yes, Zazzle — did you really read the user agreement you wrote and asked me to sign before I uploaded them? It said “you really have to own this.” And we do.

Q: So whose side is Zazzle on?
A: Their own, of course; they have to cover their legal bases, and I understand that part of it. But it seems more than a little disingenuous to advertise your service as something warm and inviting for indie artists and designers to use and then deny them because of a hidden rule or mysterious, unexplained exception.

Q: Why can’t you just go make the thing somewhere else?
A: Well, that appears to be the only option, doesn’t it? Plus, Zazzle is no longer the only site that does print on demand at a high quality. I’m looking at Lulu, I’m looking at Zazzle’s old friend CafePress, and I’m looking at other places I might partner with for the Palette-Swap Ninja merch.

But more than anything, I want to give my old print-on-demand friends — you know, the folks who totally didn’t steal their concept from another company and have ultimate respect for intellectual property — a chance to explain their hypocrisy away.

I’ll let you know what Fender says, too.

UPDATE 1/6/10: Fender has yet to respond, and Zazzle simply removed the calendar — and that’s fine with me. If you can’t sell it, don’t advertise it — otherwise, it’s fraud. I’m investigating new outlets for Palette-Swap Ninja’s gear and would be open to your suggestions.

UPDATE 1/9/10: Lulu.com to the rescue. They printed my calendar exactly as ordered — and for less than Zazzle.

That’s enough. Achievable goals.

A few sites picked up the story, and as usual, most of the reader comments on those stories were the same tripe I’ve seen over and over again whenever any blog reports on any magazine. In Kotaku’s user comments, Azures said, “The internet makes them pointless on the most basic level. the internet is killing newspapers, im shocked ANY magazine is still around.”

I was going to post a long response over at Kotaku, but I’ve decided I would rather ramble and look like a crazy person on my own turf.

Like Mom always told me, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” It’s not just about getting information, it’s about the form that information takes. This applies very strongly to magazines vs. newspapers vs. the Internet. Magazines approach info delivery very differently, but I think newspapers and the Internet share a lot in common with their approaches.

Newspapers were traditionally about getting info fast — so fast, in fact, that for years many papers had multiple editions each day. But if your main product is black text on a white background, as close to instant as you can manage? Yeah, the internet trumps newspapers. But magazines have always been more about entertainment and presentation, something newspapers only did in the Sunday magazine section (note the name!) and the Internet has not quite been able to replicate yet. (Have you ever seen a website that looks like the above — not a home page, but a web page that rich, built to be consumed/read/looked at just once? No, but you’ve seen scans of magazine pages that you can download from websites — proving that people still want the content experience of a magazine, regardless of its business problems.)

In fact, I’d argue that newspapers have had more problems with “the internet stole our immediate content” and magazines have had more problems with “the internet stole our advertising dollars.” Those dollars support the purchase of paper and cover manufacturing costs, so when that well dries up, so does everything else. Most magazines’ editorial content was not so much at fault. As I’ve said before, EGM wrote great articles but died because of poor business decisions by the bean-counters. So…where do newspapers fit into that fiscal reality? They don’t. Azures is using a classic slippery slope fallacy with “dead papers means dead magazines” when they are more or less unrelated.

I see so many magazines on so many topics at my local newsstand/bookstore/supermarket — but people seem to think that when they stopped reading their old standard gaming magazine that magazines as a whole ceased to exist — and what’s more, gaming magazines can never can exist again. Not even if they try a new approach? Not even if they target exactly what they’re doing to their specific audience? Not even if they have basically nothing in common with the magazines that have gone out of business? It’s just gamers living with blinders on again. It’s easier to assume a bleak future than to investigate a challenging present.

Yes, I’m biased. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.