My own personal opinion as a private person (meaning, not deviantART, Inc.'s official stance or my stance as an employee) is, screw those bills.
If passed and enacted. they would accomplish nothing but making the internet a shittier place. My view on this matter isn't a highly educated one, but it doesn't take much to predict what these proposed laws would cause.
History tells that people will always invent ways to circumvent restrictions on the consumer content they desire, whether it's legal and their right or not.
Copyright holders might sate their appetite  to punish those who infringe their rights and harvest money, as they already do, but they're not going to prevent anything.
Piracy can not be stopped the way the governments and corporate entities are going about that.
No, I think  those bills would accomplish quite the opposite of what they claim to want, which is, make copyright infringement in any shape or form even more attractive, because simply nobody likes their movies, music, games etc. loaded up with legal restrictions.
However, I highly doubt that large web properties such as Google, Facebook or Youtube etc. would get shut down, and neither deviantART for that matter.
Those bills are just as vague as possible because the entities behind them want as much freedom as they can get to make use of those bills.
If you're in the U.S.A., let your government and the media know what you think of SOPA and PIPA.

Join a SOPA and PIPA debate

My favorite deviation posted in 2011 is untitledWC1 by ~moldyb because it reminds me of my girlfriend and me. She's pink, I'm blue, we love to squeeze and there's such warmth and sweetness in this artwork.

What's your favorite deviation posted in 2011?

Last week was the greatest time of my life.
I flew on an airplane for the first time.
I traveled the United States of America for the first time.
I visited deviantART HQ and met almost all of my co-workers for the first time.
I met my lovely *beautyful girlfriend for the first time, which was naturally my favorite part of this trip. I felt right at home with her in Hollywood.
It was amazing and wonderful and great and I'll be there again soon.

I found this talk very interesting and absolutely agreeable as it makes some sound arguments against some of the bullshit that's going on in the art world and how to go about remedying it.

From the video's description:

"Art is often nothing more than a footnote to a (poorly written) essay making an unsound argument that uses technical and scientific terms inappropriately and without justification in an attempt to apply a veneer of rigour over their steaming pile of banal observations and utter nonsense.

This talk is a criticism of that tendency in the art world.

(c) 2011 Brad Blucher, Kyle Clements"

this is one of my most favorite tracks that has (almost) no words but inspires a vivid tale in my imagination

i feel the urge to publish my latest thoughts on the excessively tired topic of what is art and what isn't.
i deem it as a tired topic because it doesn't fucking matter what is art and what is not.
further, i feel like most people's ideas on what art makes art is just backward.

nobody makes art.

again!

nobody makes art.

people simply create stuff they want to create. maybe it's art in their mind.

other people who consume any sort of such creation may deem it art or not in their minds.

whatever anybody has in their mind about any such creations doesn't make nor change those creations.

a painting, photograph, sculpture or song doesn't give a flying fuck whether you consider it art or not.
it won't feel sad if you don't, and it won't change itself in an attempt to become art in your mind.
it is what it is, and that's stuff.

locations don't make art either.
there are museums and galleries that are as full of garbage as they are full of art.
there are also basements, attics and garages filled with both.
it just depends who's in there, looking at the stuff.

when nobody's there to consume the creations, they aren't anything.
it's just stuff.

some people make excellent stuff, some people make really shitty stuff, and some make stuff that's in between.

but art is not a thing. art is what happens when you look at stuff that tickles your insides in a very special way. your mind, your heart, your soul, your spirit. whatever you got inside of you.
maybe art is a feeling, an energy, a thought pattern.

at the end of the day, it barely matters what anyone thinks and says what is art and what is not.
arguing that, mostly stubbornly, is a complete waste of energy and passion.

i'm confident it's gonna take another 1,000 years before a large enough portion of mankind may agree on such terms and just create stuff they want to create without stubbornly arguing who's perception of stuff is more superior.

make stuff and consume stuff, and art will happen for sure. and when it doesn't, don't lose your shit toward the stuff and its creators.

Whenever we launch something new, part of the reactions always reminds of this great bit from Louie CK.



That's all that needs to be said on the subject.

I just love this track. It gives me goosebumps and chills. Moon is a great film.

After a considerable hiatus from it I've selected a few Daily Deviations for this week so far.
This probably has to do with the very welcome rule change regarding DD writeups. I like to read them on deviations that I like but not to write them myself.

The works I select for DDs usually amaze me so much that I can't put it into words, let alone just one sentence and I'd chew on broken glass before I'd make a generic comment about the pretty colors, or the composition, as if I had a clue about composition. I don't, and I'm not going to pretend to.

So now, when I like a piece so much that I wanna DD it, I just can, without breaking my head over adding my two cents, and I've done that with glee the other day when I browsed and picked 4 DDs in one go. I hope to keep it up, and I'll try to.

I like colorful and trippy stuff, personally. However for the purpose of featuring art here, if something strikes me, I don't care what it is. I just tend to prefer imagery that doesn't have much to do with every day life or reality, or that's simply not boring. I could list types of imagery that purely personally bore me to death, but I won't that. After all, to each their own.

I'll also tell you I don't feature most of the suggestions I get, but that's alright because I'm just one out of many DD selectors and I have my reasons and everyone else has theirs when it comes to featuring and not featuring stuff. I don't feature things for the sake of fairness or deserving.
But still, I do want suggestions for DDs, because at the very least there is always a place for opportunity and chance.

Long story short, I like to feature art the ways I prefer and I'm happy that I can do that.

This turned into a bit of a ramble and I just wanted to try out our new Sta.sh Writer that's currently in BETA testing. I haven't used it before and barely seen or read about it but I'm instantly liking it. I have the feeling when it's out you'll post great journals just for the fun of using this new devious authoring tool.

On that note I also feel the urge to say that our developers seriously amaze me. They're mad scientists and magicians and superheroes to me. It just absolutely blows my mind that amazing things can be built with a variety of programming languages, neither of which I have a clue about. It's fascinating. I think it's vastly under-appreciated what coders do, what they create.

That's enough random stuff for today.

Here's two of the DDs I picked this week:

I'm not always awake at 10:30 AM on a Monday, but when I am, it's to post a bragging journal.

I was just looking at my agent profile in our Zendesk (support ticket system) and saw that I broke a milestone.
To date, since May 2010 when I transitioned over to our Comm Ops team and Help Desk, I have solved over 20,000 (currently exactly 20,566) of your help desk tickets.
The majority of those should be bug reports, followed by a good pile of general site inquiries and probably a smaller pile of print and payment inquiries and lastly a thin slice of CEA related tickets.

In addition to that, I also still review several hundred ordered prints a week and I filed almost 800 tickets in our internal IT ticket tracker in the past 5 years.

That's just me.  My fellow Comm Ops team mates have certainly earned their bragging rights as well.

That's that. I thought it would be nice to put a simple statistic to the work that's done to support you.
Sometimes it's healthy to just show off such accomplishments.

I hope you have a great devious week.

last night i dreamed that jon stewart from the daily show repaired my car. i managed to rip off the driver's door in a parking lot. he happened to walk by, noticed my misfortune and screwed my car door back on. the end.

and three nights ago i dreamed that i walked into casey jones from the teenage mutant ninja turtles and he almost beat me up with his hockey stick but i apologized and he showed mercy.

tell me your weird dreams.