Free Culture News
John Colagioia- Free Culture Book Club — Pepper & Carrot, ep. 1–6 from Dec 19, 2020, 5:38am
- Free Culture Book Club — Cataclysm — Dark Days Ahead from Sep 4, 2021, 7:07am
- Free Culture Book Club — Snowbound Blood part 1 from Mar 25, 2023, 7:37am
- Free Culture Book Club — Snowbound Blood part 2 from Apr 1, 2023, 8:19am
- Free Culture Book Club — Snowbound Blood part 3 from Apr 8, 2023, 6:56am
- Free Culture Book Club — Snowbound Blood part 4 from Apr 15, 2023, 6:55am
- Free Culture Book Club — Jectoons Random Vignettes from May 13, 2023, 7:15am
- Free Culture Book Club — Only One from Dec 23, 2023, 7:33am
- Free Culture Book Club — Ada & Zangemann from Jan 6, 2024, 6:30am
This post should probably go fairly quickly, since I don’t generally “do” news; I certainly would never call myself anything like a journalist. However, I wanted to make sure that readers had updates on a few well-liked projects that we’ve talked about as part of the Free Culture Book Club.
This time through—assuming that we ever have other times—I have updates on five projects, presented in alphabetical order.
Ada & Zangemann
Originally discussed in January 2024.
The team behind Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream, the Free Software Foundation Europe, has begun fundraising to produce an animated adaptation of the book.
Now, we want to go one step further and create a 30-minute movie about Ada’s story! This movie, released as an Open Educational Resource, will be a tool to encourage more children, especially girls, to tinker and learn how to code, while fostering inclusiveness and accessibility. Help us to achieve this goal!
This will both give us a fun adaptation of a great story, and allow the FSFE to bring the story to a wider audience.
In addition to that campaign, the book’s text also now includes nicely readable text to describe the images that go with each page, making the book more accessible, bringing more clarity to the illustrations, and generally making everybody’s life more pleasant. Similarly, they’ve added and improved more translations, so if you’ve had trouble reading it before due to a language barrier, definitely give the book another shot.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
Originally discussed in September 2021.
The rogue-like post-apocalyptic survival-horror game (that doesn’t really try to scare you often) continues to advance. Whereas our Book Club discussion in 2021 covered version 0.D (“Danny”) and 0.F (“Frank”), they have since released 0.G (Gaiman), with 0.H (no name, yet) sitting out on the horizon, with regular release candidates published. And it has grown significantly in the last few years, with—for one big example that I noticed in a quick check—non-player characters who actually serve a purpose, can hold pre-scripted conversations, and move around with purpose.
Specifically, in 2021, you could occasionally convince those NPCs to feed you information or give you items, but they generally didn’t do anything other than occasionally follow you within certain boundaries. Now, they might also provide and explain small missions, and will sometimes accompany you to help or lead the action. Really, though, it has undergone many changes, including better translations, more systems to make the game more interesting, and much more.
The graphics in the tiles also look significantly better than they did a couple of years ago, as you might find by comparing the screenshot that I posted above with that in the other post. I don’t play too often, at this point, but it does please and impress me when I occasionally jump back in. And if you’ve ever wanted to play as Foodperson™️, you have your chance now.
Fodongo
Originally discussed (indirectly) in May 2023.
Emiliano “Jectoons” Carrasco continues to do some seriously heavy lifting for Free Culture, in addition to drawing two ongoing comics, one of which—Random Vignettes—we covered last year.
First, in order to pay the artists a higher commission and make general improvements, the zine has begun fundraising for a second year. They have an aim of raising 6,500CAD, across all revenue streams. As one of the few continuing Free Culture projects, and the only one actively encouraging new artists to produce Free Culture works, at the moment, I think that we’d all like to see it succeed.
In addition, you don’t have much time left to participate, but you might want to know that the zine has also started running a contest. Submit something based on a comic from the first six issues, and three winners will receive their choice of three physical copies of the zine. And depending on your medium of choice, they’ll feature your work either in the zine (paid a commission) or on the website. You have until June 26th, assuming that I have done the math correctly.
Oh, also, fundraising for a second year implies another noteworthy point, here, one year of convincing comic artists to produce Free Culture works. 🎉
Pepper & Carrot, et al.
Originally discussed in December 2020.
As I mentioned in my Topical Grab Bag, as Pepper & Carrot starts winding down, creator David Revoy has expanded the universe into the more comedic and short-form Mini Fantasy Theater format. It hasn’t migrated to its bespoke domain, yet, but you can find the first six episodes on Revoy’s blog, one of which you can see now in the image above this paragraph.
Like any comic with a fixed format, the jokes probably won’t always land for various reasons, but I’d still say that the format has a lot of potential to give the world of Hereva more breadth, if not depth.
Snowbound Blood
Originally discussed in March and April 2023.
After more than a year’s wait, we have received version 14 of the game, which includes the final chapter of the story, Til Death.
And…
I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t quite expect this angle to concluding the story. You probably don’t want me to expose the ending of prior versions, but let’s say that we get two endings, for the characters on different paths, one hinting at a potential sequel, along with a heaping helping of their world’s philosophy. An epilogue also points us to a prior comic, which doesn’t appear to carry a Creative Commons license, so I didn’t bother to investigate any of it.
If you enjoyed the story, you’ll probably want to go back and get closure on the events. It admittedly doesn’t resolve the problems that I saw when going through the story the first time, but I honestly wouldn’t expect them to do that, especially as it teases a sequel.
The Future
I should mention that I don’t plan on doing this again, at least not often. As I’ve said, journalism—even of this limited sort—doesn’t feel like a field that suits me, especially given that I have such opinionated ideas on what even constitutes Free Culture, at least for these purposes; for example, I would probably avoid covering photography projects and news, even if the licenses qualify. That said, since I did outline and discuss the importance of a news-about-Free-Culture outlet in my post on the Free Culture Movement, last week, if people want to feed me updates on their projects and encourage other creators to do so, I’ll do what I can. At least one of these stories did come to me through e-mail, in fact.
If someone finds my journalistic ability insufficient and wants to do better, though, all the better…
Credits: The header image combines AFN Berlin TV News Set by Peter Dollé—made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license—with my existing adaptation of FC.o logo by Karen Rustad Tölva, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The cover of Ada & Zangemann has been made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license. I took the screenshot for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and presume it to fall under the same terms as the game. The Fodongo logo comes from the sixth zine issue’s cover, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license. The comic is Monster, by David Revoy made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license. The Snowbound Blood splash screen comes from the game assets, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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