This makes me think about Thomas Kinkade and his business dealings. If one reads Kinkade’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll see his business had problems in the last few years. His manufacturing company had hoped to solve some high costs by outsourcing in 2010. Did this happen? What do their public or investigated financials look like?

Well, if they didn’t get this resolved, looks like others are making money NOW on his style in Dafen Painting Village in Shenzhen, China. Best bet would be to go to Dafen and buy out a few artists, or setup the Thomas Kinkade village.

You can’t fight the copying. You can slow it. A much better strategy is to exploit it, feed it, and use it to your advantage. Remember, copying might allow for some process-based innovation! That is not true technological innovation. That is the real hard work.

Over at Fabricatorz blog, I made a quick fun post about how to make dirty fuzzed out imagery using Inkscape. Try it out, upload your results!

Spring has arrived in Beijing. Don’t think we forgot about the Laoban. We might just have to milkymist him very soon.

There are people living in a desert with dead grass everywhere, pollution in the skies with recently rich people driving with no concern around neighborhoods. The first rays of spring cut through the smog and bathe the earth. The ground is dry, but with a little rain and some seeds, life will grow again…

Seeds ✳ Jon Phillips

I think 90% of the photos of me, I’m looking down. I hope its not some latent insecurity. I spend a lot of time thinking! All that thinking from my overclocked brain cooked my hair right off! Yes, I digress.

The point of this post is to checkout the great photography Christopher Adams is doing! We all have hobbies. Fabricatorz have some creative hobbies. Mine is markiting. Christopher is putting out quality photos daily now. Check them out!

Christopher and myself at secret noodle bar in Sanliturrr, Beijing.

Sophie in Beijing Forrest

This is near where I spend most of my time when in Beijing.

This is from a place I eat once a week, Wain Wain, a strange Japanese bar that gives me some perspective now that Open Plane Ticket is no longer functional.

Fabricatorz 2.0 Website

Check out the new Fabricatorz! It shows one of the strengths of Aiki Framework, to use old databases. What you see at Fabricatorz website is aiki-powered. We are keeping the WordPress admin interface for posting right now. Over time, we will slowly remove the lobotomized WordPress, but for now, the site is running nice and fast!

Aiki Framework 0.9.0.1

Open Clip Art Library 3.1

Has it really been a year since we made an official Open Clip Art Library release? We finally moved the site off of community hosting servers because it has become a big site to maintain and needs lots of ongoing love and features. Check out the new Open Clip Art Library features!

• Our new favoriting system
• A better landing page including more main page features and the most popular clipart.
  Collections have been improved
• Our server has been moved to a big linode box, thanks to gandi.net for supporting our development
• We added imagebot image editing to each clipart page simpy click the “Edit Image” button on a Clip Art detail page.
• Now you can set the resolution of the raster art you desire to download by entering a number into the white box on a Clip Art detail page and by pressing the orange [PNG] button. You can copy the link in that box and use it as HTML anywhere on the web.

And, More Soon…

We have a big launch planned for another project in late March here in Beijing, and many many client projects at 99% that are about to be launched at Fabricatorz. I’m still pushing hard on all four of my projects: 王✳爻气. For 2012, I’m moving my social mark”i”ting to sites I control and you will see less biz talk here and more of those ole’ fashioned @rejon type hash taggings. This year is about less hype, no conferences, and more production. Don’t forget, if you are coming through Beijing, looking for a tactical creative a-team for hire, or want to buy a milkymist: email jon@fabricatorz.com.

Part of the reason I’m not using social media now is that I have found that I am not able to have complete thoughts. Instead < 140 characters gives me a funnel towards emotional comments, and unfounded arguments. Well, I have a secret weapon in my battle for making longer than 5 sentence speech fragments, and its more than Christopher, Nkinkade or Wolfgang countering my sometimes emotional decision making.

My original unfounded comment: “China has the most people living in poverty.”

Here’s how a gift email landed in my inbox:

Per our discussion about population in poverty, the latest is that the government has raised the cap from RMB 1274 per yeary to 2300 RMB per year. by the latest standards, there are 120 million people in poverty in China.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13th, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% (46.2 million) in 2010,[2] up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. In 2008, 13.2% (39.8 million) Americans lived in relative poverty.[3]

The government’s definition of poverty is not tied to an absolute value of how much an individual or family can afford, but is tied to a relative level based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four, which roughly equals RMB 37,995 per person.[4] Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.[5] There remains some controversy over whether the official poverty threshold over- or understates poverty.

China and the US still has vastly different standards about poverty therefore direct comparison of the number of people in poverty aren’t meaningful.

Thanks for the thoughtful research. Time to get with the program REJON!

In early September, Fabricatorz were contracted by Creative Commons to redesign and launch an updated website design in time for the Creative Commons Summit and its fall fundraising campaign. Later we were to roll-out the same theme across their other major websites. That means we had to crank out in a short time a theme that could be simplified, controlled from one set of master files, and change quickly based upon regular direction from CC staff, while making sure everything works well across five web engines: the main wordpress site, civicrm, the cc licensing engine, CC’s Wiki and search.creativecommons.org.

And the above happened after I killed all my sim cards, American phone plan, and turned off all social media notifications.

Now it time to do Marking all over the world. There is little need to print new propaganda unless you need mass market growth, but is that even good?

Muji can’t handle the Marking Revolution!

The US Global Entry program too, just pwnd into a Fabricatorz brochure showing off the four horseman projects of Fabricatorz.

#!/bin/sh
#
# A quick way to rename mailman lists and trust me you aren't going to find
# a better way to do this on ubuntu server
#

OLD="$1"
NEW="$2"

echo $OLD
echo $NEW

/etc/init.d/mailman stop
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW} && echo '*** That mailing list name already exists. ***' && exit 1

mv /var/lib/mailman/lists/${OLD} /var/lib/mailman/lists/${NEW}
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD} && mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD} /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}
mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD}.mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${OLD}.mbox && mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${OLD}.mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${NEW}.mbox && /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch ${NEW} /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${NEW}.mbox

newaliases
/var/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases
/etc/init.d/postfix restart
/etc/init.d/mailman start
exit 0

I’m still a nerd.