poke your buddies

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Sometimes it pays off to IM that random person on your buddy list whom you haven’t talked to in a while… out of the blue I IMed fractalpanes today, and she mentioned in passing a couple of articles that involve me, one somewhat indirectly.

First, there’s a good story at Campus Progress, which unfortunately suffers from truly horrid alliteration in its subtitle, two teenage digital Davids down Diebold, and gets our name wrong in its title, “Swarthmore Free Culture” (the correct name being Free Culture Swarthmore). Of course, I can’t really blame the reporter for confusing the name… many of the other FreeCulture.org chapters named themselves the other way around, like Emory Free Culture.

The second article, Clear-Cutting the Future: We’ll Hear More About This in 2005, mentions the Alternet story on FreeCulture.org in passing, and I get quoted! Except that it’s misattributed to Desirina! Man, I was *that close* to being famous… easy come, easy go. I do like the TV-B-Gone gadget that the author mentions, and I think he’s got 2005’s trends down pretty well. But he really should have read the article that he was quoting a little more carefully.

In conclusion, when you poke your buddies, sometimes they reveal useful information! It’s like an RPG where you have to talk to everyone to complete the level. Or maybe it’s not, really…

3 thoughts on “poke your buddies”

  1. “Teenaged”? It really grates on my mental ear to hear “teenage” applied to college students, even 19-year-olds. And I’m pretty sure we were all older than 19 when the Diebold thing went down, though my memory’s hazy — certainly everyone involved was older than 20 when the case finally ended.

    Was “college-aged” or just “young” not colorful enough for them?

    • Actually, both me and Luke were 19 when we started the suit, but you are correct, roughly a year passed before the suit ended, so we were 20 by the time it was all over.

      Mother Jones was very glad to have interviewed us before our respective birthdays, so that they could play the “teenagers sue Diebold” card. I’m not sure why “teenager” has such cachet, maybe it has something to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Teenagers are just awesomer than everyone else. Enjoy your awesomeness while you can, freshmen!

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