Kevin Kelly

The Whole Earth Catalog was like a preview of the World Wide Web, before the WWW existed. It was the best thing going back then, as far as ways to discover interesting things and, along with its companion publication Coevolution Quarterly (and later Whole Earth Review), ideas.

Also as an aside, Kevin Kelly, who is still producing interesting material today (http://kk.org), ran the magazine for a while, during which time he was developing the vision for what became Wired magazine. This was around the time of the software catalogs and in the early days of the Well. There's an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog called "Signal" which was essentially a preview of Wired, before some people with money came in and claimed credit for founding it... I think he is still given credit as a co-founder but he was the visionary and instigator who made it happen.

[Edit: I see in his own bio he says: "In 1992 I joined a small team which launched Wired magazine in January 1993." LOL! That's insanely modest. In around Spring of 1987 I sat with him in an office at Whole Earth Review while he described this magazine he wanted to do, a larger format magazine, breaking some size rules, with bright colors, bold, creative layout, and lots of experimentation with creative or just plain abusive typography, focused on tech and the culture around it... Signal had to rely on the older printing technology so it didn't have the color aspects as I recall but the vision he described in that meeting was 100%…

Another good resource for learning how to draw realistically is the book: "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". The premise is that your brain wants to take shortcuts and group/chunk things together on what they should look like, instead of what things actually look like. But even a rectangle in real life has non-right-angles because of perspective, etc.. And if you draw what you actually see, then the drawings come out correct. Some of the exercises are copying other drawings placed upside-down, so that you brain doesn't try to over-interpret things. I can't recommend this enough if you want to go from a beginner to something respectable in drawing abilities.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/

https://kk.org/cooltools/drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain/

Following up with actual numbers for the project, from Lulu, in Euros:
List Price 43
Print cost 11
Distribution fees (read: Amazon, 50% of selling price): 21.5
Lulu share of profit : 2
Rest to author: 8,5

Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live).

For books sold directly on Lulu
List price 43
Print cost 11
Lulu share of profit: 6.5
Rest to author: 25.5

The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publishing/

People depend on Apple products and spurious results are not acceptable, whereas on social media sites, and Google search results, you can expect the worst, and get it regularly. Enshittification is the norm, IMO.

This makes the point:

> If it’s 100% accurate, it’s a fantastic time saver. If it is anything less than 100% accurate, it’s useless. Because even if there’s a 2% chance it’s wrong, there’s a 2% chance you’re stranding mom at the airport, and mom will be, rightly, very disappointed. Our moms deserve better!

Introducing errors is not "what technology wants" [0]

The upside of this is that people are realizing that unreliable technology is not for everyone. All it takes is one gaffe to break trust, and there are too many gaffes.

[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/what-technology/

Have a couple in random order:

Be intentional about who you spend time with, who you work with, who you serve, and who you listen to. (March 2019, Patrick McKenzie, @patio11)

Dreams don't work unless you do (April 2019, Sara Dietschy)

The failure mode of clever is 'asshole' (John Scalzi, 2010)

Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean they love you. (Lou Whittaker, Rainier mountain guide)

Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going. (April 2021, https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/)

Feedback is nutrition. Everyone goes for the sugar and positive feedback, but you need your greens too. (Oct 2014, Morten Heuing)

Fair enough. I agree that $500 is a big ask for public domain content, however there is still a service provided by Getty in surfacing this content. It seems fair to charge a fee for that convenience- after all, the consumer has an option to do that work and find it themselves if they value their time less than the cost and have the necessary knowledge. Kevin Kelly identifies this in his excellent article “better than free“ (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)

Getty asserts a related point in the claim- that the work done to build extensive metadata for the content (which Stability apparently used for training their models) is a valuable service in and of itself.