I wrote this document over 4 years ago, but never published it really, until now, because I believe that it is still current and at relevant for most people today. Carsten Cumbrowski, Fresno, CA, November 2014 The current copyright laws are so messed up that it is impossible for an average person to make heads or tails out of them, that it requires a highly specialized person or better even group of persons who can up with the best tale to tell, to convince a judge, who is also unable to make up heads and tails in most curt cases what the head is and what the tail (or who) and thus, who has to be right and who could possibly not.?? I was affected by the copyright laws myself in more than just one single case and also made in more recent days more and more eyewitness account of events that I would have a hard time believing myself, If I would not have seen them happen with my own pair of eyes. I was talking about some of those experiences already in the past at my personal blog and elsewhere and actually wanted to something about this subject. This is now my first attempt of doing just that.?? I collected a lot of??material and information to the subject of copyright laws and the problems with them in the current society over the past few years*1, which are the basis for this article. I put it on ???Google Docs???
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It was time for a re-design of my ASCII Nudes gallery. I had 3 main goals in mind. Make the original photographs or pictures used by the artists as reference accessible directly within the gallery. Previously those were only available via an older blog post of mine. Allow easier navigation of the gallery. I accomplished that by providing full keyboard control throughout the gallery and by providing the ability to jump to the next piece directly from the detail overlay screen, without the need to go back to the main gallery grid. As mentioned in 2. already. I am using overlays now instead of annoying pop-ups or new browser windows. The Boss-Key feature is still around, although not via the big red prominent button as before. Now a simple pressing of the letter “b” on your keyboard will do the trick. If you press “b” for a second time, you will be back where you left of before. Keyboard Shortcuts Available in the Detail Overlay: a = show ASCII Version p = show Photo (if available) s = show Side by Side (if available) + = (The + on the Key Pad) Increase Font Size (only available in ASCII View Mode) – = (The – on the Key Pad) Decrease Font Size (only available in ASCII View Mode) d = Download Original ASCII Text File Arrow Right = Next Piece Arrow Left = Previous Piece ESC = Close Overlay h = Show Keyboard Shortcuts Help b = BOSS Key
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In April 1996 three of the four largest and active game warez release groups at the time, Dytec ??? Dynamic Technologies, Vortex and EOD ??? Empire of Darkness merged into a single mega release group called ???Dynasty???. I was co-leader of the Dytec PC section at the time and took an active part in this mega-merger. Dynasty has no homepage today so I decided to put up a page on my web site, where you can read about the creation of the group and also find historic artifacts like Dynasty Crack Intros, CD-Rip Installers, ASCII, ANSI and Pixel Art etc. I thought that this might be a good idea and is part of my continues efforts to preserve scene history for the future. The page can be accessed via this link. Below is a screenshot of the top part of that new page. Dynasty Media Pack Release I also created a media pack release, which contains all the art work and intros created for Dynasty. The pack is much larger than the one that I created earlier for the release group Dytec, because I also included Video captures of the Intros and MP3 recordings of the tracker modules this time. It is still ???only??? about 98 MB in size and what are 98MB nowadays? The NEW – DNS – Dynasty Group Media Collection. Included in this collection are: 7 Dynasty MS DOS PC Intros 2 Dynasty MS DOS CD-RIP Installers 9 Video Captures of Intros and Installers in AVI Format
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I posted the last update of my scene logos collection in August 2009. I thought that is time to actually release another one. There are several reasons for it. First, the last update included many logos that were not sorted away properly and simply dumped into the sub folder by first letter instead of the logo with the title of the group or production. I also de-duped several hundred logos using a modified version of my own De-Dupe script. The biggest change of all is the addition of some archive support scripts. More about those in a moment. I also stopped the assignment of version numbers or volumes to this collection. The last update was called volume 2, which would make this one volume 3. But this sucks and does not tell you anything about the release really, so I started using the Month+Year to indicate its age and last release update date. Your Contributions / Help is Wanted Also new is the addition of 20+ folders for groups where you can only find a text file, but no logos. Those are groups where I know about the group and are pretty sure that there exist logos for them out there somewhere, but wasn???t able to manage to get my hands on those. The text file includes a short note and a link to my contact page with the request to send me logos for those groups, if you happen to have any of them. The same invitation can be[…]
The recent unfortunate events surrounding SAC were not only a surprise for me and a disappointment, but also caused me to stand back for a little and reflect on what happened over the past 16 years when a friend of mine and me started the group 16+ years ago. I did not plan to write as much in detail about stuff as I ended up eventually, but what is new? Hehe. Yes, this tale is written in a personal narrative and describes things the way I experienced them and remember today. This means that it is probably full of errors and bias??? that I might or might not was aware of. I already wrote about how I got started with creating art. You can read all about it here. How it Started I co-founded SAC in December 1994 together with Hetero, whom I had just met in person for the first time a couple weeks earlier. I discussed with him the lack of a German art group and also the lack of an art group that has closer ties to the Warez scene. At that time the requests that I received just for NFO file logos and designs increased significantly. Instead of sitting around and just whining about those facts, we decided to start something. He and I knew some other local artists who were ???independent??? at the time. We asked them if they would join a local art group and that???s how it all started. The name for the
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