It's Cold in Boston.

Originally uploaded by annainaustin

Just wanted to share this picture of snowy Boston with you. There's more to come on my close encounter with Snowpocalypse '11!

Look, it's a blog redesign!

You might notice this blog's spiffy new design that was recently done by the ever-fabulous Paul Sicard, whom I had the foresight to marry in 2002. I've even changed the name to better reflect what this blog is; an outlet for the many shiny things that I'm attracted to in the pop culture landscape. 

The image in the background is one I took in the artists lounge at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. The whole thing was decorated with a "Hotel California" theme, since the Eagles were playing the festival.

You may have already seen this column I wrote for the Statesman on the festival.
  

Awesome spot at the "Hotel California" themed ACL artists lounge!

It's strange how much of my past is on the Internet.

When I was looking for something else I'd done, I found my book review of 1997's  "new" Anne Rice that I'd totally forgotten about writing. It's the bottom half of this two-part-er!

I actually kind of like the intro for the review of Servant of the Bones.

"The bigger they are, the louder the thump when they hit the remainder racks."

It seems I also once reviewed Violette's Embrace. Who knew? (Scroll down to the bottom of the review section.)

Also, I found a book review of Sins. Truthfully, I remember more about being at Barton Springs reading the book, than I do about the book itself!

There's even one of my articles being used as a reference for a wikipedia entry on "electronic games."

Update:

Oh, look one of my pictures is being used by the Latvian band Instrumenti for their Wikipedia entry!

Things you find when you Google yourself!

I create things, then I forget all about them. Once I've published something--or posted a picture on flickr---I tend to forget about whatever it is. I've never really been all that curious about how people interact with what I create, once a window of about three days has passed.

I figure, if I spelled anyone's name wrong, or forgot anything important, it would turn up during that three days. (Three days is, not un-coincidentally,  about the turnaround for a huffy letter-to-the-editor to arrive, citing exactly what someone is unhappy about. Trust me on this.)

Turns out that people continue to do things with my content, long after I've forgotten all about releasing it into the wild. 

In order to write the previous post about Hello Kitty, I googled myself. Amazing what you find. I might have found more, but I got bored searching.

Here's a picture I put on flickr that someone used for an article. I'm not the best photographer in the world, so I'm always a little flattered that someone wants to use one of my pictures!

Paul and I got married.  It must be true, it was in the UT alumni magazine. I must have sent it in, as this happened before Facebook, and not everyone knew!

Someone read an Austin-American Statesman column about zombies. And they liked it!

A possibly Latvian  link to my Latvia/ACL column that was on Austinist (scroll down to the bottom.)

An article for a conservative news service, that got more conservative once I turned it in. (It has a 2008 date now, but I think I wrote it in 2001.)

Someone using my pic of one of the dudes from Passion Pit signing their setlist at Emo's as a background. From 2009?

An article about Latvia that uses my picture of fish. I think the article is in Latvian, but I don't speak the language, so it's hard to know for sure.


Let me know what else you find. Who knows what else is out there!

The editor of Cooks Source is an idiot...(aka my experience w/ having my "Hello Kitty" article republished.

Hello Kitty Guitar! In Tokyo!

To put things in context for everyone, especially my friends outside the US....

The Internet's intellectual-property scandal of the day involves  the magazine Cooks Source re-printing an article by Monica Gaudio, without the writer's approval. When she contacted them to see about being compensated and having an apology printed, she got a reply from the editor, telling her that everything on the Internet was public property.

**original post as follows**
    
All of the fuss about the editor of Cooks Source thinking that everything on the Internet is public property made me think about my experience with having my articles republished without my permission.

Back when the Internet was young (1999) I wrote an article on Hello Kitty for the Austin Chronicle that was republished all over the web, mostly by people innocently putting it on their personal fan websites, because they didn't understand that wasn't the right way to do it.

Since I was paid for the original article--and since most instances of it being republished w/out permission were with my name, an Austin Chronicle attribution, and sometimes a link back to the original article-- I didn't worry about it too much. I reasoned it was just Hello Kitty fans being excited about what I said.

Much of the reason I decided not to worry about it being reposted was that, most of the time when someone put it on their webpage, they appeared to be a high-school girl with a bigger "Hello Kitty" fixation than me. Their hearts seemed to be in the right place, even if their grasp of copyright law was shaky.  Also, by the time I knew what had happened, that article was everywhere. Hello Kitty was out of the bag.