It's amazing to me how we're watching the tech world fall apart at the feet of monetization and AI and whatever other bullshit of the week, and it's all exactly the consequences that the Free Software folks have been warning about and talking about for decades.
But the free software folks are, often, aggressive ideological purists or incredibly gatekeep-y, and free software as a movement has been seriously hampered by both of those things, and also by the same monetization push that is eating everything else.
We built our entire world on computers. We embedded them in every facet of our lives. I've spent my entire life With The Machine.
Well, we keep doing what we've been doing here on the fediverse.
We keep building things like Peertube, and using things like peertube to build things like #NewEllijayTelevision and https://communitymedia.video and, when we can afford to do so, we financially support the people who make the software that provides an alternative to these closed worlds.
Dual power. We build the future in the rotting husk of the present.
It's very simple, and was done by hand, based on a template I wrote for a personal site like 10 years ago. I used that template because, with the right color scheme, it looked the part.
It links to another website for the blog and the shopping cart, because I don't want to duplicate labor.
and I think we're going to celebrate the new website and the launch of the new show with a VHS is the future video festival (it ain't a film festival, there ain't no film.)
So, what do you think? Is it time for a shot-on-video festival?
I can try and partner with our makerspace, or with #NewEllijayTelevision to turn it in to something worth seeing.
(We will absolutely accept things shot on digital video, including your point and shoot or cell phone to this festival, but if it looks like it was shot by professionals on professional gear you better dirty it up in post.)
Do you want to run a television network for your community? (That might be a local community around you, or a community that is separated by geography and united by a common cause.)
We're looking at getting our network on local cable, and once that's accomplished I'll update the book with info on how we did it.
We're also looking at establishing other #NETV affiliates. You wouldn't be #NewEllijayTelevision, but you'd have access to the #NewEllijayTV videos and archives in exchange for offering the same to us for things you produce, and using some NETV affiliate branding (Like your local NBC or CBS affiliate does.)
Doing this in the face of the existing capitalist media structures is Hard. Producing video is expensive and time consuming. Making things that have an impact is even harder.
I'm very proud of the work we've done so far, though, and I am looking forward to doing more as we venture in to the next phase of #newellijaytelevision
The first LP from Red Hot Empty, Coupled with their first Live performance as Red Hot Empty is now available on a super limited edition Vinyl LP with screen printed jackets.
These are an edition of 100. I put them up about 10 minutes ago, and we've already sold 15. They will sell out, and there probably won't ever be any more, but there definitely won't be any more like this.
They're $30. That's the price of a short run special edition LP. Sorry.
Packaging for our community entertainment center was finalized today.
These are some photos of the boxes.
The boxes are upcycled from the packaging for the computers we're using as the basis for the project (and will be labeled as such, this kind of re-use is absolutely the way to deal with packaging waste, and should be celebrated imo.)
at its heart, the Community Entertainment System is an open source set top box running on an x86 HDMI-stick computer, with a remote and basic game controller support. It is configured to display media from #newellijaytelevision and #AnalogRevolution and mountaintown radio and a collection of open licensed podcasts.
As other indie networks come online (jokerjokertv in Athens, for example) they will get added automatically. (It's all RSS based!)
The software is all open, and end users are welcome to customize it to their needs. There will be a simple image available to reset to factory, and a secure update mechanism, so we can ship new features etc.
Apparently we're going heavy on political content on #NewEllijayTelevision these days. Here's our latest show "Behind The Curtain" which is a media literacy and analysis program, covering mid-century propaganda films.
We'll release new episodes periodically. We rushed this first one out a little ahead of schedule (for obvious reasons.)
My good friend @connor_dylan has been on something of an artistic tear recently. I shared his recently released album on friday (and I'll stick a link to it again, further down in this thread, because it's good) but yesterday he did something else.
Here is the trailer for a new political news program he's producing for #newEllijayTelevision
If you've started following me in the last 8 months or so, it was probably because I said something pithy about the fediverse, or because you saw me talking about #newEllijayTelevision
This might have led you to think that I'm a media person, and not a computer person. This would be a mistake. I've been on the fediverse for more than half a decade, of course I'm a computer person.
In fact, I do a lot of retrocomputing (or, at least, I used to! People are complicated, circumstances change.)
You don't have to take my word for it, here are some things I've written:
If you don't have anything better to do this morning, we've got Saturday Morning cartoons and Saturday afternoon Adventure Movies on New Ellijay Television.
I haven't talked a lot about the writer's strike recently (mostly because I've been dealing with small implosions within my little community, as relationships have ended and people have drawn battle lines, and I've had to come to the defense of people I previously believed unassailable. So it goes.)
But I've been thinking about the writer's strike a lot, both because I care deeply about workers issues and because the outcome of the writers strike will directly impact the success of the company I am joining on Monday.
Yesterday, there were a lot of stories about the studios plans to drag the strike on as long as possible, in order to hurt the striking writers, and these were reported on uncritically as if it was some surprise.
I found this frustrating and naïve, and I'd like to talk about it a bit in between other things today.
Now, I don't have any inside track on the studios, and I don't currently work in the media industry, beyond the work I'm doing to destroy it with the power of community media production re: #NewEllijayTelevision#netv.
I don't know that the studios are scared, running out of money, and so desperate for the writers to take a deal that they would do basically anything, and that they are attempting to shift the narrative to make it seem like that is not the case in order to bluff at least some of the writers in to accepting a bad deal and returning to the table.
I don't Know that, but I strongly suspect it, and I've played poker often enough to know the kinds of hunches I can trust.
9:00:00 New Ellijay News
9:20:00 The Battle of the Century
9:40:00 The Pirates of 1920
10:00:00 New Ellijay News
10:20:00 First Spaceship on Venus
11:40:00 Yongary
1:00:00 New Ellijay News
1:15:00 Expedition Sasquatch S01E01
1:45:00 The Slowest Gun in the West
2:40:00 The Indestructible Man
3:50:00 Rocky Jones Space Ranger - Crash of Moons
5:05:00 Colonel Bleep - S01E10 - Scratch and the Sea Serpent
5:10:00 Space Angel - The Light Barrier - S01E08
5:20:00 Colonel Bleep - S01E12 - Test of Friendship
5:25:00 Colonel Bleep - S01E13 - Shadows of Suspicion
5:30:00 Space Patrol - S03E24 - The Man Who Stole a City
6:00:00 Men with Steel Faces
7:05:00 Jupiter's Ghost s01e01
7:30:00 The Magic Sword
9:55:00 The Phantom Planet
10:15:00 Dark Mistresses Midnight Movie presents Cat Women of the Moon
11:25:00 Little Shop of Horrors
This is a website with information about #DIYTV and #NewEllijayTelevision, a history of independent video from the #videofreex through to #youtube and suggestions on how to proceed in to the future.
It's still growing. There are almost certainly typos, formatting issues, dead links, awkward phrases, incorrect information, missing instructions, etc. Over the next week or three I'll be adding links, embedding videos, sharing code, and writing additional supplemental and instructional materials.
But the site is up and it works, and I have a page through which you can by a hand bound zine style copy of Community Media: A Handbook for Revolutions in DIY TV.
The clip that I shared at the top of my last thread (https://retro.social/@ajroach42/110497705648080505) was created by one of two loosely affiliated video activist groups of the 1960s and 1970s. That group, The Videofreex, went on to become Lainsville TV. They decended on a small town in upstate new york and ran a pirate television station. (They are a core inspiration for many of the things I do at #NewEllijayTelevision)
The other group, which shared some members and values but took a more mainstream commercially successful route, was TVTV.
TVTV made documentaries. Here's a documentary they made about how the 72 DNC was a nearly entirely anti-democratic affair: