Posted by Bunny.
Sometime over the past couple days we went over 1,000,000 episode views at YouTube. Cool. Not our primary viewing audience, but I'll take it. We should celebrate by eating something fancy. ~B.
Filtering by Category: 2007
The Pinky Show in Portuguese
Posted by Bunny.
Our friend Rosana in Brazil e-mailed us to let us know that she made subtitles for our trailer. As far as I know this is the first-ever subtitled PS episode. So cool. If you can read Portuguese, here it is.... Big hug to Rosana. ~B.
Bunny Mailbag for August 21
Posted by Bunny.
Pinky & Kim went to run some errands in Los Angeles today so I am answering e-mails in the meantime.
E-mail number 1:
"Hello Pinky, To lend more force to your arguments, I would love to hear more about what your 'credentials' are - education, etc. (I am guessing that you are some kind of poli-sci or international law student). It will make a big difference because I think that [people] will be more likely to watch it if [you] can stick some degrees beside your name... Much thanks, B."
Reply: Dear B., We don't list degrees because we would like people to consider what we are saying based on what we are saying instead of the degrees we have. Thanks, Bunny
E-mail number 2:
"This is a response to your "27,000 Holocausts". This is neither Fan Mail nor Hate Mail. Call it Realignment Mail... Asia has a different perspective on life. Nuclear weapons were developed by and for European countries. In WWII the U.S. forces were introduced, in Japan, to the Kamikaze. Next to Nuclear weapons, it is the most devastating weapon ever encountered. One aircraft piloted by a person with this mindset, could take down whole ships. A person who does not want to die is one thing, but a person who does not want to live is another... You mentioned "India versus Pakistan" as a possible place for a Nuclear weapons to be used. Again, you should ask "Why?" Because they do not care. Look at the living environment of these people. They do not have much to loose in any kind of warfare. The same goes for most of Asia. Look at Vietnam and the rest of India or Africa. You mentioned that Israel has the 'bomb'. But you did not state of what importance this was. But Iran does almost have it. And they have sworn to use it precisely on Israel. No bones about it. Hate is a strange thing. It spreads like a cancer and will only kill the host. Guns do not kill people. People kill people." It is the spirit of Man that is the enemy. If you really want to 'Stop Nuclear Weapons', then give the people something for which to live, not to die. Answer ==> Provide clear drinking water and housing, clothes and security for their children. If you want to end Nuclear Weapons, then do not take them apart by decree; let them rust apart from dis-use." - Viktor
Reply: Dear Viktor, I'm sorry, your generalizations about people who don't want to live are very stupid. Please do not build a philosophy of life upon "realigned" ideas like this; if you do you will only be called unpleasant names for the rest of your life. Goodbye. Bunny
E-mail number 3, from some guy claiming to be Nikola Tesla:
name: Nikola Tesla
organization: Reality
"I was behind AC not Westinghouse... Also, modern execution is generally done by lethal injection or the gas chamber. Ethically Vacant indeed. Not only is big business lacking but so are groups like you swine. You think it is okay to half research your little topics as long as you make your point...You are just as bad as them."Reply: Dear Ghost of Nikola Tesla, We weren't talking about you. Also I think you may not know what modernity is, perhaps you should look it up. Or are there no dictionaries or books in the afterlife? Goodbye. Bunny
This is why Pinky usually answers the e-mail around here.
~B.
Too Windy for Recording
Posted by Pinky.
We were hoping to do some audio recording tonight but it's so windy that we finally gave up (we don't have one of those soundproof recording rooms you see on tv). I have a ton of work I could be doing instead but since I don't feel like doing real work tonight, I'm procrastinating by making multiple diary entries... :P
Anyway, a few days ago a guy named Joel e-mailed us 10 interview questions for some kind of project he's doing. I was going to wait to do it after I'm all caught up with all my work, but...
Q1: To start off, why did you and Bunny choose cats to represent yourselves?
A: Sorry, I don't understand this question.
Q2) What do you find to be the largest problem in modern society?
A: This is a hard one. I'll go with 'individualism'.
Q3) What inspired you to tackle the topic of political, and governmental philosophy?
A: I don't know anything about these subjects, sorry.
Q4) What do you recommend veiwers do to make a difference?
A: I don't recommend anything. People are capable of acting on their own analyses.
Q5) What is your absolute favourite food?
A: I will say 'pie'.
Q6) What other hobbies do you and Bunny enjoy?
A: Bunny reads a lot and likes video games. I like to walk around at night. We also like all kinds of music.
Q7) What are the pros and cons of a cat living in the desert?
A: Pros: It's peaceful and the landscape is beautiful. Cons: It's harder to get things (food, books, etc.) and of course the temperatures get pretty extreme. Also sometimes we wish more cultural stuff was going on around here.
Q8) Do you enjoy Political Satirists such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert?
A: Yes.
Q9) Do you believe in Evolution or Creationism?
A: I like Creationism because it's a lot easier to understand, but my intuitive sense is that it's total bullshit.
Q10) To end off, what is your absolute favourite piece of literature.
A: I don't read much fiction… I enjoyed… Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
~p.
E-mail: Why No Holocaust?
Posted by Pinky.
We frequently receive thoughtful and interesting e-mails. I'll try to post some of them here in my diary. This one is from A., she is 14 years old.
[ note: These e-mails have been edited for length. ]
Dear PinkyShow, ...I have gone through and watched most of your videos, and took particular interest in the one on the definition of "Crimes Against Humanity". I would like to request (as I am so bold) that you do an episode... on the Holocaust. I am currently 14½ years old, and I have been studying anything I can find on the holocaust for several years... I may not be Jewish, but the indecency and lack of cause disturbed me into interest of the subject. I have done many school reports, papers, forced class speaking and informative posters on the subject, as well as reading more books than I would care to count. I've spent numerous hours on the internet, finding as many pictures, videos, articles, names, dates, quotes, and re-tellings that I can find. The Holocaust has become to me what some may call "a sick obsession"... After seeing your video on "Crimes Against Humanity" I searched YouTube for hours finding many videos and slideshows of Holocaust horrors (as the Holocaust, in my opinion, is the most indecent and despicable crime against humanity ever committed.). I wondered how, after discussing so many interesting things and so many topics on politics, the Holocaust itself didn't come up in any discussion of yours. It would mean a lot to me, and all those who died at the hands of the Nazis (god rest their souls), if you would take a bit of time and dedicate it to the Holocaust. This, of coarse, is just my suggestion, and you have no need to accept it if you feel so as not to do so... I believe the Holocaust is the worst case when it comes to crimes against humanity...
Sincerely,
A. (who is a girl)
My reply:
Hi A.,
Thank you for your thoughtful note.
A., I have to agree with you about how many parts of human history seems to be very dark and painful. To be honest, we here at the Pinky Show often feel very repulsed by the darker aspects of human nature. But we also think it's important to study it, if only because these matters continue to be so relevant today. We are genuinely shocked at how throughout world history human beings have heaped such horrible campaigns of death on each other, over and over again (although maybe not always conscious of what has come before). The Shoah is probably the most well-known example in this country, and as such it's probably easier to find information about it compared to other genocides. One day I would like to do an episode (or episodes) on this subject, but for the time being I've been focusing more of my attention on the genocide of Native North Americans. Not because the Shoah is somehow less worthy of attention, but because in my opinion a lot of Americans still don't want to talk about how the U.S. would not exist without genocide. For me this just means that U.S. Americans absolutely must study this history. There are lots of important texts on the subject - a place to start if you are interested:
American Holocaust, David Stannard.
Facing West, Richard Drinnon.
A Little Matter of Genocide, Ward Churchill.Personally I don't say that the Shoah is not as important as Native American genocide, or vice versa. The logic of genocide is evil in every case.
Sincerely yours,
pinky
Busy is Good
Posted by Pinky.
The past few weeks have been good. I'm happy because we've all been really busy working on a whole bunch of stuff; that always feels like 'progress'. Bunny's been doing a big under-the-hood type overhaul of our website. When she's done the website should be both more secure and easier for us to update. Kim & Mimi have been working on some grant writing and communications stuff in their spare time (they both work full-time). I've been doing lots of research, interviewing, and writing for the upcoming full-size episode on internal colonies, and at the same time I've also been working on a medium-sized episode on immigration with my friend Daisy (hopefully we'll be able to release that one in the upcoming week). I'm also guest editing an international radical education zine; I have to be done with that in the first week of September, which is right around the corner, so that one's actually been kinda stressing me out. Oh yeah - Bunny and I recently started working with a group of settlers in Hawaii on an education project which I'm hoping will produce some good results. This work will probably require that we go back and forth to Hawaii over the next year or so. I hope we can also do some additional work in Hawaii while we're there - I was born there and there's a lot of things about Hawaii that I want to know more about.
Bunny and I usually reserve Sunday mornings for making shirts (if we haven't received any orders for shirts during the week then Sunday morning becomes our sleep late day). But anyway today we had to make some shirts and when I was packing them I noticed something interesting. With the exception of one shirt, all the rest were going to smaller cities or small towns I'd never heard of. When I looked at where all the previous weeks' shirts had been mailed, it was mostly all small towns too. We've also mailed quite a few shirts to people outside the U.S., though the idea of someone walking around wearing a Pinky Show shirt in, say, Durban, Belfast, or São Paulo - that's pretty hard for me to comprehend. But anyway I've just been pleasantly surprised with how much of our support has come directly from smaller communities and foreign countries. This underground media thing has turned out to be a lot more fascinating than we had anticipated...
It's almost 2:30 p.m. I notice I always start getting hungry and thirsty around this time every day ("breakfast").
~p.
....................................
[ Later note: We had spaghetti & onions. ]
Finally a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit
Posted by Bunny.
After waiting for more than a year, Mimi finally got the phone call from the IRS today that our application to become a non-profit educational organization was approved. It won't be official-official until we receive our certification letter in the mail (probably next week), but according to her this is really good news. Now we can apply for more grants than we could before, and I think monetary donations made to The Pinky Show will also be tax-deductable. I will ask Mimi to write an entry explaining what this all means.
~B.
2008 Presidential Frontrunner?
Posted by Pinky.
From a press release:
CLEVELAND, OH – In the political equivalent of a "blind taste test" taken by more than 67,000 participants, an independent website surveying public attitudes on various issues is reporting that Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is the first choice of a phenomenal 53% of respondents. No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, even reaches double digits.
The results
The issues
The website (http://www.dehp.net/candidate/) has been asking respondents to express and rank their opinions on 25 different issues – the war in Iraq, health care, the environment, Patriot Act, etc. — that have been raised and debated among the Presidential candidates in both parties. Those taking the survey vote only on the issues, not for or against any individual candidate. The 67,000-plus responses were then correlated with the positions of all of the candidates... As of this morning (the survey is recalculated every five minutes), more than 35,600 respondents were "in sync" with Kucinich on the issues. Democratic front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton was the first-place choice of only about 2,400 respondents (3.6%). Other leading candidates fared even worse: Senator Barack Obama (3%), and former Senator John Edwards (1.3%)
"When people vote exclusively on the issues that are important to them, without being influenced by name recognition, celebrity, or millions of dollars in advertising, Congressman Kucinich wins in a landslide," his campaign said today.
Well that's pretty interesting. I have an idea. Maybe after the election is over, we can compare the data showing Kucinich's pre-election landslide victory to the post-election data showing his landslide defeat. Then we'll have a better idea of exactly how much the American people value perception over reality.
~p.
....................................
Posted by Bunny: That's not a fair statement, I don't think the American people want to value perception over reality. You make it sound like it's a preference, whereas it's actually more like a bad habit. Here's a better idea: Let's take the pre- and post-election numbers for Kucinich and others, and then factor in 1) the amount of dollars spent by each campaign; and 2) the amount of effort/time each candidate is built up/torn down by the media. Do that and you'll have a nice picture of how much money & "reporting" is required to actually reverse public opinion.
....................................
Posted by Kim: Why you guys being so negative? I'd vote for Kucinich.
....................................
Posted by Bunny: If cats could vote then maybe he'd win. CATS NOT ALLOWED TO VOTE.
....................................
Posted by Pinky: Okay, maybe the tone of my comment at the end did sound negative. But I don't want to underestimate the power of money and media. If we like Mr. Kucinich or someone similar, crossing our fingers and voting for him is not going to make any difference in the outcome of the elections.
....................................
Posted by Bunny: CATS CAN'T VOTE.
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Posted by Kim: I meant "if I could vote".
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Posted by Bunny: Cats = No Votes
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Posted by Kim: GRRRR I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!!!
YouTube Insanity
Posted by Pinky.
Last week was crazy. On July 19 (Thursday), one of the YouTube editors placed a Pinky Show episode on the front page of YouTube. We immediately felt the difference in the form of thousands of e-mails pouring into our mailbox. Apparently not everyone was thrilled with what we have to say, as the very next day (Friday, July 20) the Pinky Show website was hacked and we had to shut it down for a few days while Bunny cleaned it up. To be honest, we were all kind of surprised that someone would hack our site in an attempt to silence us. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was annoying and I'm sure Bunny didn't enjoy debugging the site. But seriously - anybody who's spent any time at all with cats must know that you can't stop us from doing what we want. I'm sure this won't be the last attempt to shut us up, but in the end, all of these attacks will fail. We are not big, or rich, or powerful, or anything exciting like that, so instead we will just be relentless.
Back to the story. By Friday, July 27, we'd finally slid off the front page of YouTube. But in the span of one short week we've acquired over half a million episode views and over a thousand new subscribers. Pretty fascinating huh? During the week I also replied to about five or six hundred e-mails. My sincere apologies if I never got around to answering your e-mail - there were just so many and in the end I had to skip a lot of very charming e-mails just because my eyes were getting all weird like: O.o
So anyway, our 15 minutes of internet mini-fame has finally run its course and all I can say is that it was really exciting and fun. We made a lot of new friends! It was also a great learning experience. We not only got to learn a whole bunch about hacking, but the big increase in traffic and feedback produced a lot of information that now we get to sit down and analyze.
Things are getting back to normal around here and I think starting tomorrow I'll be able to get back to doing some of that fundraising work we'd started before this YouTube thing blew up. I'm excited to get back to work on that stuff because we're really focused on finishing that episode on internal colonies.
Oh wait - one more thing! In the middle of all this e-mail and hacking craziness we also managed to crank out a mini-video open call for a project we're currently calling Americanism: The Movie. If you haven't already seen it please check it out. It's only been up for a couple of days but it seems to be generating some interest. So I'm hopeful that more people will post video responses, enough so that we can edit them together and make an interesting episode out of it. If you, or anybody you know, has an opinion about Americanism - or globalization, colonialism, racism, or any of the other little morsels that wrapped together make up the giant Americanism Burrito, please consider participating in this project.
Photo of the actual giant Americanism burrito.
It's bedtime; I better go. Goodnight. ~pinky
....................................
Posted by Bunny: Holy crap, that's a big burrito. Look how small the Coke is.
....................................
Posted by Kim: What's inside the burrito?
Americanism: The Movie
Posted by Bunny.
We're kicking off a new side-project today called Americanism: The Movie. It's a little different from what we usually do in that we are asking for audience participation via the YouTube website. Confused? Click here to see the trailer.
Pinky Show website hacking update.
Posted by Bunny.
As many of you know by now, on Friday, July 20, someone hacked our website. We took the site offline as soon as we found out about the problem and Bunny set to work on getting things back to normal. As I write this (July 22), our website is now clean and back online. We also took the opportunity to update other parts of our site - these areas will come back online over the next few days.
As far as we can tell, the malicious code (a.k.a. malware) that was placed on our site during the hack was designed to exploit security problems inherent in PC computers running Microsoft Internet Explorer. For this reason we think it's especially important for anyone using this combination (Windows PCs + Explorer) to immediately take steps to protect yourself by using an up-to-date antivirus program (Kaspersky, Norton, McAfee, NOD32, etc.). Even if you use a different web browser (Firefox, Opera, etc.) it's generally good practice to regularly use antivirus and firewall protection ("safe computing"). Another good idea is to always keep your Windows software updated with the latest patches from Microsoft. Malicious code in the form of trojan horses, worms, and viruses of all kinds are very common all over the internet (over 100,000 different flavors, with over 200 new ones coming out every month) so please take care of your computers!
A special thank you to everyone who stepped forward with information and assistance, and also to everyone else for being so patient and supportive. We took our time getting the site back online because we like to be as careful as possible and wanted to double and triple-check everything.
Please take care!
pinky, Bunny, Mimi & Kim
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Cats, Toast, and Habeas Corpus
Posted by Pinky.
In an article titled Habeas Corpus: A Defense Against The Dark Arts, Caroline Arnold discusses the political significance and psychological impact of the U.S. government's suspension of habeas corpus. You know what habeas corpus is, right?
In common law, habeas corpus (Latin: [We command that] you have the body) is the name of a legal action or writ by means of which a person can seek relief from unlawful detention of himself or another person. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action. (from Wikipedia)
Anyway, at the end of the article, she ends with: "...if you secure a piece of toast with the buttered side against a cat's belly and drop the cat from some height it will spin indefinitely in midair and never land. That's because, as the necromancers of White House science would tell us, cats must always land on their feet and toast always lands with the buttered side down."
Fascinating. Luckily we have both toast and cats available to test this theory. We will post the results as soon as possible.
~p.
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Posted by Bunny: All I can say is anybody who reads this article and still chooses to do nothing about it - Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right - better not complain too loudly when they're tossed into a secret military prison at some black site... ]
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Posted by Pinky (July 20, 2007): We are done with our testing and it's clear that the White House is lying to the public. Mimi did not 'spin indefinitely', falling quite rapidly to the ground 5 out of 5 times. She did enjoy the butter though.
The Pinky Show Featured on YouTube
Posted by Bunny.
One of the editors at YouTube picked The Pinky Show to be on the front page of YouTube. Cool. We're getting a ton more e-mails than usual. I suppose this is our 15 minutes of 'internet fame'. Next week: back to obscurity.
Cats With Guns
Pinky Stuck in Bed
Posted by Bunny.
Pinky fell off a ladder last Friday. She hurt her back and so she's mostly just lying down at the moment. I'll post another update if she's not up and around by the end of this week.
Is it really Independence Day?
Posted by Pinky.
Today is the Fourth of July. Here in the United States people call it 'Independence Day'. We woke up this morning, looked at the calendar, saw that today is the day, and wondered if we could feel the difference in freedom if we just sat quietly for a few minutes. Kim said she thought she could feel something but the rest of us agreed that today pretty much feels exactly like yesterday. [ Bunny: If you want to feel different get off your ass and do something different. ]
Today marks the 231st anniversary of the Continental Congress' approval of the Declaration of Independence. That's 231 years since that profound document was written up and agreed upon - "Yup, we're going to do this". So with all those smart guys standing behind that promise (Thomas Jefferson & gang) and 231 years to work on it, we should pretty much have the "all men are created equal" thing covered, right?
Well, no. Apparently there's always going to be a lot of work to do. Things get better, then they get worse, then they get a little better again, then a lot worse, then a big step towards good in response to the last bad - it goes on and on and I guess our biggest job is to just not give up. I mean, if we still think "all men are created equal" is a good idea.
We had a short meeting this morning and decided to take the day off from our fundraising activities (the stuff we've been doing non-stop since our Las Vegas meeting) and instead use this Independence Day to relax and remind ourselves what we're trying to work towards. So, today's schedule is filled mostly with scenes of peaceful domesticity and also a couple of documentaries we've been meaning to watch for a while. And cartoons.
7:00 a.m. Wake up, brush teeth, etc.
7:15 a.m. Trying to 'feel the independence'.
7:30 a.m. Meeting.
8:00 a.m. Mimi & Kim marketing, Bunny & Pinky clean up.
10:00 a.m. Do e-mail.
10:30 a.m. Write this post.
11:00 a.m. Make lunch for everybody.
11:30 a.m. Eat.
12:00 p.m. Watch cartoons.
12:30 p.m. Discuss cartoons.
1:00 p.m. Snack break.
1:30 p.m. Watch documentaries: Make It Plain (1994), The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).
5:30 p.m. Start walking to spider's hole.
6:00 p.m. Dinner with spider & family (bring large-size marshmellows).
11:00 p.m. Finalize new t-shirt designs & vote.
2:00 a.m. Sleep.
Hmm... I haven't been writing in this diary as much as I should. I respond to a lot of e-mails every day; maybe I'll post some of them here.
~p.
Summary: Las Vegas Meeting, June 12-18 (Part Three)
Posted by Pinky.
Although we weren't able to resolve every single issue that needed addressing on our agenda, we did decide on how to proceed on quite a few things. This is a very condensed version of some of the conclusions reached during our meeting - all subject to change of course!
Looking Forward: The Upcoming Year
• What are some of the upcoming episodes that we want to do in the near future? Well, the biggest elephant in the room for us is colonialism (i.e., Native/Settler relations), both throughout history and right now. We'll finally have a chance to touch on that in our upcoming 'What is an internal colony?' episode. Also in line for upcoming episodes (hopefully) are analyses of popular culture. We really like art, music, movies, etc., but we really haven't talked about any of this stuff yet in any of our episodes.
• Translations & Subtitles: We've received a few e-mails from people outside the U.S. who have requested subtitles - especially in Spanish and German. Although we all agree that it'd be great to have The Pinky Show translated into these and other languages, we have a few constraints. First, none of us know how to speak either of these languages. The second issue is one of time. We only have a two-cat production crew to do the job of making new episodes (our top priority) and running most of our day-to-day operations, and I feel like we are already stretched pretty thin. Bunny has an idea though - she really likes anime (Japanese animation) and says that the way a lot of anime is subtitled into other languages is a good model for how The Pinky Show could also be done. These translated episodes are called 'fan-subs' and basically the subtitles are created by viewers of the episodes who can speak both the source and target languages (bilingual). The producers of the episodes themselves are usually not involved at all. Sometimes the viewers who do the translations meet and coordinate on a website dedicated to creating the subtitles (essentially a 'translation wiki'). It's not like we're lazy or don't want to be supportive, but politically speaking we think it's important to maintain a certain amount of 'distance' between ourselves and the finished subtitled episodes simply because we can't vouch for the accuracy of subtitles we can't read. If viewers understand they are reading subtitles generated by other viewers rather than our production team, we think this will go a long way toward dissipating a fair amount of false assumptions and misunderstandings before they arise.
• The $$$ Situation: So far we have been trying to fund the PS through grants and donations. We also have recently opened a Pinky Show online store. The short story is that none of these have shown much promise in terms of funding our project, at least for the time being. So far no one has shown any interest in funding the PS through grants. Our site traffic continues to go up every month and we receive lots of encouraging e-mails, but besides a tiny handful of individuals (thank you to those people!) we have also not been receiving any donations. So far we have sold maybe 3 posters, 3 shirts, and a Pinky doll from the store. So instead, practically all of our 'funding' has come from our outside work - building websites, photography, design stuff, etc. But according to bookkeeper Mimi we haven't hit equilibrium - with our current ratio of outside work to Pinky Show work, every month we continue like this we accumulate more debt (apparently we've been spending too much time working on Pinky Show stuff, and not enough time making money doing outside jobs). So until we start getting grants and donations, we need to be more disciplined and only work on producing new episodes after we've raised the money to pay for their production. If we don't do this our debt is only going to get bigger and sooner or later we're going to starve. Not good.
• Mimi doesn't think donations are ever going to be a good way to sustain The Pinky Show. She basically thinks that even if people like watching our episodes, people are 'cheap'. I'm not sure if that's true or not but I also think that we don't have nearly enough traffic at our site to receive a significant amount of donations. I'm guessing only a tiny fraction of people actually make donations. So I think we need thousands and thousands of people visiting our site every day just to have a chance to receive a decent amount of donations. For this reason I think we need to focus on attracting lots more viewers to our website. We have to build relationships with larger, more well-established progressive organizations in order for this to happen. Examples of this kind of relationship building include having our videos (or at least links to our videos) prominently placed on high-traffic websites, co-producing episodes that other organizations can immediately put to educational use with their membership/audiences, and so on. Bunny and I will try to do a little of this kind of work every week, but I think this falls under the category of 'long-term' development work. It's kind of amazing (ridiculous?) that we've actually never done any PR or marketing-type work the whole time since we started. No wonder no one knows we exist... o.O
• Mimi brought up the question of whether or not we want to (re)consider the possibility of 1) doing an iTunes style buy-our-episode-for-$1.00 type of thing; or 2) making our website only accessible via some kind of subscription thing; or 3) accepting advertisements as possible ways of generating income. I vetoed all of the above. I see these as last-last-last resort kind of options and anyway I highly doubt they'd work. I don't think people feel like learning from cats is something they'd be willing to pay for; I don't want money to be a barrier (even a symbolic one) to poor people accessing the content we produce; and we don't have enough traffic to interest advertisers (not to mention Bunny and I hate advertisements...). No.
• Mimi will continue to pursue grants whenever possible. I'll help her with the writing. To be realistic though, it may take us a long time to figure out how to get grants. Neither of us are experienced in grantsmanship.
• One of the things that I'm pretty good at is making things. So we decided that Bunny and I will try to raise some money by making and selling more t-shirts. We're going to make a few more designs and then try selling them on eBay and stuff like that as a fundraiser. I doubt we'll make a lot of money this way but at least we already know how to make t-shirts and it's the kind of thing that can bring in some income right away (I hope), instead of months or years from now.
• I also got some unexpected encouragement from the others to try to write and illustrate children's books. At first I was like 'Yuck, I don't even like human being children...'. But Mimi made the important point that they don't really have to be for children at all, that children's books is really only a format - very simple text and lots of pictures. So basically I can make children's books for adults. This idea I like. So I will be trying that. I have to look into how we'd be able to economically print out the books - there's no sense in making a lovely children's book that costs $80 each. Mimi suggested e-books, and while that's a viable option, in the end we decided that if we can find a way to print out a physical book for a reasonable cost then we'd prefer to have something people can hold in their hands.
• One of the main set of questions that needed answering before closing our week-long series of meetings: What will we do if we can't find a way to have The Pinky Show financially sustain itself? How much longer can we continue before pulling the plug on this project? We all had slightly different answers. Mimi and Kim have promised to keep on helping for at least another year. But they do have other commitments and I'm sure it's been hard for them knowing that they've directed a lot of their hard earned money to this project and yet we're still struggling. Bunny said she'd be willing to keep on working on the Pinky Show until she dies, even if financial constraints force her to treat it as just a part-time thing. I feel like I want to work on this until I die too, but I see this as being primarily an educational/political project rather than a hobby, and as such I feel like this project has to be of a certain scale in order for it to make sense. If I can't somehow find a way to eventually produce an episode a week (my dream output), I think maybe I could be more useful doing something else. I'll wait until next year's meeting to see how I feel about it then. Until then I'm going to keep working on this as if our little project is guaranteed to find support.
I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things (I didn't take notes the entire time) so Bunny, Mimi, Kim - please feel free to add whatever you like to these notes.
Postscript:
• Tuesday, June 19: Upon arriving back from our trip, I find an e-mail in my mailbox notifying us that we have been rejected for another big grant we had applied for. Sad!
• Wednesday, June 21: We receive an e-mail from a curator of an upcoming exhibition on radical education at a museum in Slovenia, asking us if we'd be interested in participating. Yes we would! Happy!
So goes our roller coaster ride here in our lonely corner of the Mojave desert.
~pinky
Summary: Las Vegas Meeting, June 12-18 (Part Two)
Posted by Pinky.
A week of meetings generates quite a lot of minutes. I did take notes but it's not a verbatim transcript per se, so my apologies to everyone if this summary contains inaccuracies or misinterpretations of what was actually said.
Looking Back: The First Two Years.
• All of us agree that working on the Pinky Show project has been a good learning experience for us. It's really pushed us to learn how to do things we never would have otherwise attempted (none of us actually enjoy working with computers) - for example, we've had to learn how to: build and run a web site; record sound and music on a computer; draw cats; edit video; make t-shirts; and so on.
• It's kind of amazing to us how much of the time we've spent during the first two years has been just trying to learn how to do all the technical stuff necessary to produce the Pinky Show. It may not always be apparent to viewers, but in every episode we usually try to experiment a little in order to improve on at least a couple of things. As we get more comfortable with the 'production' side of things, we'll be able to make new episodes faster and more efficiently.
• The most rewarding thing about working on this project however has been the 'non-technical' aspects: doing research; drafting and editing scripts; searching for or creating illustrations; talking to all kinds of knowledgeable people. It's really been the kind of 'education' we were looking for.
• We all agree that the best part about making The Pinky Show has actually turned out to be the part that no one else gets to see. After we do our preliminary research ('information gathering'), we all sit down and start discussing how we should present the information. We argue about the implications of presenting this way and that way. We map out all the ways we imagine what we say could possibly be interpreted by different audiences (and the logical consequences of each). It probably doesn't look like it when people see the final result, but behind the scenes we actually do a lot of fighting (and yelling and biting and scratching) about what matters and why. We have a lot of arguments about wording. Each discussion inevitably sends us back to do more research; we repeat this until we feel like we can make an episode that has what we call 'instrumentality'. Ultimately we make decisions based on whether or not something will make an episode more useful as a political weapon. Even if it's a very small weapon. Anyway, the working process we've developed is not a methodology per se and it's certainly not efficient. But it's been the most enjoyable part and being able to slug it out on a daily basis is having a profound effect on all of us.
• Our episodes have slowly (technically) improved. One day we'd like to re-do some of our earlier episodes (version 2.0), especially the Columbian Exposition one and the Vietnam War episode.
• We've experimented with different formats for presenting information and will continue to do this using formats we haven't tried yet - for example: music videos, slide shows, tutorials, street interviews, and so on.
• Our favorite episode type so far is the ones where we start out with a 'simple' question and do the research in order to try to find an answer - for example, the Vietnam War episode, the Iraq War episode, etc. Unfortunately episodes like these also take the longest to produce and so they are also the most expensive to produce. Runner-up is we like the merging of travel diary with research, such as in the Columbian Exposition episode. We like this format but of course these also tend to be expensive because of the additional costs associated with travel. We like interview-based episodes and they are much faster (and therefore cost less) to make, but since they are telephone interviews we think maybe it is visually a little boring. In the future, whenever possible, we would like to do some in-person interviews.
[ Bunny's note: If we do in-person interviews that also adds travel costs because we're in the fucking desert. ]
• Originially we had intended the Pinky Show to be a very short-form program (approx. 3 to 5 minutes per episode), with a new episode released every few days. Although we still like the concept, we quickly found out that that format didn't really suit our personality-types. We tend to like to be very careful in our research (which takes a lot of time) and also we tend to like to look at the relationships between things (which also tends to be not-so-easy to explain). All of these things made our episodes longer and longer and basically we have really struggled to keep our episodes short and 'tight' rather than go on and on in a discursive fashion. We always joke that pretty soon we'll be making 2-hour documentaries, then after that 10-hour, 5 part mini-series.
• Most of our episodes thus far have centered on pretty dark subject matter. This was not our original intention but considering the current state of world affairs (and the fact that with the exception of Kim we are basically a serious bunch), we're not surprised it's gone this way.
• Mimi & Kim originally intended to be more actively involved in research and writing. However for various reasons this hasn't really happened (yet) and Mimi's PS work has mostly been limited to financial and organizational paperwork and some grant writing. We wouldn't have been able to continue work on the Pinky Show, however, if it weren't for Mimi & Kim's outside work and financial contributions that have allowed us to pay for equipment, bills, and all our other expenses. Hopefully in the near future they will be able to be more directly involved in creating content.
• Bunny & I have also had to spend lots of hours away from Pinky Show work in order to take on (paying) outside projects. Based on our calculations we would have been able to produce at least 50% more episodes over the last year if we were able to dedicate all our time towards the Pinky Show.
• The relatively large number of international viewers has been an unexpected but nice surprise. The question has arisen about whether or not we should provide translations (subtitles) in other languages.
• Viewer feedback has (generally) been far more positive than we had anticipated. Which is nice, but it makes us wonder if people are really understanding the implications of what we are saying.
• Lack of funding continues to be our largest problem.
Okay, just like yesterday, this entry turned out to be really long. So I'm going to stop right here and tomorrow I'll conclude my report by summarizing some of the stuff we discussed that relates to what our plans are for the future. Hugs to everybody.
~pinky
Summary: Las Vegas Meeting, June 12-18 (Part One)
Posted by Pinky.
We just returned from Las Vegas yesterday. All in all I think we got a lot done. Although it was only a week long and Las Vegas really isn't so far away, by the time we got back we were all very, very tired - so tired that I feel like I should only be using short sentences to record my thoughts. Some people have been asking for a summary of what we did on our trip so here it is.
Sunday evening, June 10. Start walking to Las Vegas.
Tuesday morning, June 12. By the time we get to Las Vegas we're so tired we decide to rearrange our schedule and do 'nothing' the first day. We had planned to give ourselves Friday off but instead I'm out-voted 3-1 and we immediately use the first half of our play-day to nap and recover from the long walk (100 miles). After napping we rent cat bicycles (tricycle for Kim) for the afternoon and ride out to Red Rock Canyon, right outside Las Vegas. Our plan was find some nice shade and just sit around and admire the scenery, but when we got there it looked like everything was recently burned (desert fire? no shade at all) so basically we just had to keep on moving.
I had to take a picture of this - these mountain-sized rocks are at the Calico Basin at Red Rock. To me they looked like giant, sleeping cats.
Okay, maybe not so much in the photograph, but they did in person.
Anyway, by the time we got back to the city it was pretty late. We returned the bicycles and met up with two of our human being friends at their hotel in Downtown Las Vegas. They gave us food and let us sleep in their hotel room every night for the remainder of our trip. We didn't have a meeting that first night, we just went to sleep.
Wednesday, June 13. This was our first day of work. In the daytime we went to the Atomic Testing Museum for 'information gathering', from 9 a.m. when it opened until 5 p.m. when it closed. We took a short break for lunch (Himalayan food - loooks and tastes like Indian food to me). From about 6 p.m. till about 2 a.m. we had the first of several Pinky Show meetings. The meeting went long so we went to bed without dinner.
The Atomic Testing Museum
Thursday, June 14. Daytime was spent doing more information gathering. We went to the Nevada Test Site - home to about a 1,000 nuclear detonations and probably the most bombed place on Earth. While we were there we had a run-in with 'security' (with all their SUVs and guns and body armor) that was really an adventure in and of itself - but I guess that's a story for another day.
One of many warning signs at the entrance to NTS.
Thursday afternoon & evening: more meetings. Dinner was Las Vegas 'buffet food'. Between the two of them I think Kim and Mimi probably ate about a thousand shrimps. I have no idea how so much shrimp can fit in such a tiny cat (Kim). Buffets are a terrible idea.
Friday, June 15. More photography and note gathering at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire. These places are beautiful. And hot! The heat kept on making our camera shut down.
The water of Lake Mead is so blue it glows.
Lots of bright orange-red rocks at Valley of Fire.
Like the previous two days, we have a long meeting from late afternoon to about 3 a.m. Dinner is Chinese food. I'm still trying to avoid eating animals so I ate mushroom-noodles & pea sprouts while the others ate fish.
Saturday, June 16. Two more of our human being advisor-friends arrive in Las Vegas and we all have another meeting together. I have a baked potato for lunch. We break at 5 p.m. and attend a friend's wedding held in the backyard of a house on Torrey Pines Drive. It's a small wedding - 22 people and 4 cats. We have lots of fun and leave around midnight.
Sunday, June 17. Another full day of meetings, starting from the morning and ending at 10 p.m. We get dinner food from a Whole Foods Market. I have never heard of Whole Foods Market but apparently they are popping up everywhere. I don't know if the food was healthier than what we usually eat but it didn't taste good.
Monday, June 18. One last day of meetings. This meeting and the previous one centers on matters of financing The Pinky Show. On one hand I do realize that talking and planning about money is essential if we're going to be able to continue working on The Pinky Show. But personally I'd rather spend my time thinking about matters of history, culture, politics, and stuff like that, so basically these meetings feel like some form of mild torture. Regardless, by the time we say good-bye to our human being friends I feel like we've made some progress in terms of deciding on some of the things that need to be done in the immediate-future. We all wave good-bye to each other and they go catch their various airplanes to go back to where they came from. The sun goes down and we start our walk back home.
Tuesday, June 19. Arrive back home.
Wow, I was also going to talk about what we discussed in our meetings but this diary entry is already so long and I'm sure you're already bored by now. So I think I'll continue on tomorrow. Sorry.
~pinky
Back From Las Vegas
Posted by Bunny.
We're back home now. Pinky will be posting a summary report in her diary, probably tomorrow.
Walking to Las Vegas nearly killed us. It's only 100 miles but it was about 115-120°F (46-49°C) in the sun. Too hot - I thought I was going to die. Everybody’s noses got so badly sun burned even with sun screen and hats. Next year I vote for holding our meeting in Alaska.