This is going somewhere, I promise.

In 1969, the Ford Mustang Mach 1 sold for $3122.

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In 2008, the comparable GT MSRPs for $27,420.

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One thing these two commercials make clear is that the Mustang is as American as a rapidly diminishing attention span. So why does the car cost 9 times more 4 decades later? Everyone knows it has something to do with inflation. But what exactly? And more importantly, what does this have to do with you and your merchandise sales? Everything. So watch this video.

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M3 and You

“Don’t know about you
but I am Un Chien Andalusia
wanna grow
up to be…
be a Debaser.”

Debaser, The Pixies

Look, you’re already a business person. Whether you do an order a day or 5000, you’ve already crossed the threshold from being an artist to being an artist-entrepreneur. It’s no small accomplishment, but if you’re not paying attention to what is happening in the financial system then you’re missing something with potentially large implications for your business.

So the short answer is that supply of US Dollars in circulation is growing…  So much so, some say, that the Federal Reserve decided to simply stop reporting it.

The redline ending corresponds to the date the Fed stop putting out their report. Private sources such as Shadowstats.com have jumped in and grabbed the baton, trying to reconstitute M3 from public sources. This picture is the purple line labeled “M3-SGS Continuation.” So, according to this source, annual money supply growth is now at 17%. As the CNN reporter points out in the YouTube clip, the more shares you issue in a company, the more you dilute the stock. Similarly, the more money you put into total circulation, the less each single unit buys.

Okay, pretty simple.

Money supply growth isn’t new. But usually its growth glacial enough to not draw scrutiny from an unsuspecting public. But if this source is correct and we’re on track for 17% growth in a year then we’re in trouble.  Even if it was 10% we’d have to be paying very close attention.  Incredibly, the most common measure of inflation, the official government numbers, have long since removed “Food” and “Fuel” from the calculation.  You’d have to really be nuts to miss this happening.  Dizuh.  A couple of months ago, one of my favorite Austin restaurants eliminated most of their breakfast menu, raised the price of their Poquito Migas by 20% and went to “countertop service” for breakfast to reduce the cost of having employees there all morning serving breakfast.  Businesses are taking such actions everywhere.

Why Tell You this?

Simple.  You’re a business too. You’ve got costs.  And if you’re paying attention, you’re seeing them go up.

• Do you sell t-shirts? Has the cost of blanks gone up? How about ink?
• Do you sell paper products like cards or comics? Have you noticed ink and blank paper costs more?
• Do you sell DVDs? Is your duplicator charging you more for dupes?
• Do you pay for packaging? Is your corrugate supplier charging more?

Your vendors, at least the ones most aware of their own costs, are bearing increased costs from THEIR suppliers. This may already be translating into increased costs to you. Rather than passively endure the squeezing of your own margins, you need to be looking at ways to make sure you’re not the one losing in the end. If your suppliers aren’t raising prices then they may be lowering quality or quantity.  Why? Because it’s the same difference.

Other Strategies

At Amplifier, we are encouraging our clients to add Print-on-Demand products. Why? Because they’re not required to outlay much if any cash up front. Their end audience finances each product as it is ordered. In fact, they’re often covering the printing/shipping and handling costs and STILL delivering margin back to the content creator.

Even here, our costs are going up.  Vendors have raised the price of our paper by 10% and of course we expect this trend to continue. Ink costs are behaving similarly. We’re rolling with it.  If all this talk about money supply gets you excited, well, our condolences.  Sadly, we’re right there with you.  Experts disagree on where all this is going, so we don’t pretend to know the future.  Here are some really interesting and differing opinions on where things are going.

• Jim Puplava - like John Williams of Shadowstats, Jim believes hyperinflation is coming to US
• Mike Shedlock, aka “Mish” – Believes a Japanese-style deflation is coming to the US
  
• Nouriel Roubini – Econ professor at NYU – Expects Stagflation

Forewarned is forearmed.

If you’re following along on Twitter, you haven’t missed this good stuff:

• Despair’s latest vividly demonstrates awesome longer-form storytelling via video (here you go, Mr. Eisner), parts 1 and 2;
• Ask A Ninja isn’t shy about anything talking web video;
• Rooster Teeth has launched Red Vs Blue: Reconstruction;
• Laughing Squid captured the world’s largest lolcat;
• SoHo has a 20′ Lala;
• Diesel Sweeties celebrated a six-year undiversary. Congrats, yo!
• AppleGeeks honored Memorial Day;
• Kris Straub has opened his sketchbooks. So cool.
• Go inside PAA Episode 1.

More soon. Promise.

The guest list really is a who’s who of Internet fame and/or ignominy. Amplifier’s own Joel Bush will be there to hopefully document the event. We gave him a great video camera so honestly, he’s without excuse!

ROFL Con (In their own words)

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.

Then, there’ll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

• Chris Onstad at Achewood features an irreverent, but ultimately affectionate, strip explaining the basics of D&D to those who are unfamiliar with it.

• Giant in the Playground imagines Gygax’s arrival in heaven.

• Full Frontal Nerdity thanks Gygax “for saving us all a place at the gaming table.”

• Dork Tower remembers Gygax with an incredibly sweet, earnest cartoon.

• The undie band Uncle Monsterface (which defies description, but in a wonderful, wonderful way) offers a free download of their new song “(thank you) Gary Gygax.” (Via Wired.)

• At the Rooster Teeth blog, Burnie Burns writes: “He was born with a space alien’s last name; he was destined for nerdom at birth. D&D didn’t exist so he had no choice but to invent it.”

• Penny Arcade features an unbelievably touching, and perfectly executed, tribute to Gygax.

It’s easy to understand the outpouring of emotion from the undependents — Gygax was an undie pioneer, creating not just an original work of art, but an original form of art as well. He created D&D out of whole cloth, and he did it himself, releasing the very first editions of the game himself, without help from major distributors. He was almost a godfather to generations of creative types, and the undependent scene wouldn’t be the same without him. Rest in peace, Gary.

Nice call, Steve. Thank you.

We help audiences (all of us) find, follow, and enjoy the best work from the emerging class of self-sustaining Internet-based artists, aka the Undependents or Undies, who are telling amazing stories within podcasts, video, webcomics, machinima, animation, etc.

As curators, we feature these programs:

• Undependent.com, which focuses on success stories, trends, insights, and practical advice.
• The Undependent Del.icio.us feed, compiling excellent reference material and news;
• The Undependent Twitter feed, a quick spotlight on great new content, merch, and news;
• The Undependent Universe, our living museum showcasing the best Undies. (Thanks, Netvibes).

The Undependent Universe’s Collection continues to grow. It currently includes the following, in no particular order (visit the site for links):

• Webcomics: The Perry Bible Fellowship; Girl Genius; PvP; Starslip Crisis; Sheldon; Evil, Inc.; Piled Higher and Deeper; Wondermark; Unshelved; Dinosaur Comics; xkcd; A Softer World; Cat and Girl; Dresden Codak; AppleGeeks; Ctrl+Alt+Del; User Friendly; White Ninja Comics; and Octopus Pie.
• The Drumbrella Exhibit: Boy on a Stick and Slither; explodingdog; The Creatures in My Head; Diesel Sweeties; Overcompensating; Scary Go Round; Goats; Wigu; as well as RSS feeds from the creators;
• The Achewood Exhibit: featuring all character blogs;
• Videos/shows: Funny or Die; College Humor; The Onion; Heavy.com.
• Others: Penny Arcade; Rooster Teeth Productions; Angry Alien Productions; JibJab; Despair, Inc.; Ask A Ninja; Smosh; Homestar Runner; Those Lil’ Rabbits; Tiki Bar TV; Engrish.com.
• How To’s and News: Fleen; Webcomics Weekly; Comixtalk; Cold Hard Flash; NewTeeVee; Halfpixel; Web TV Wire; Thinking Machinima; Digital Strips.
• Rotating special exhibits highlighting great stuff, and much more!

We hope our programs help you enjoy the Undies more easily and regularly. We live in such an exciting time, eh? Creative expression flourishes, and newly empowered creators keep inventing more ways to delight their fans.

Thanks again, Steve, for your great post and ongoing work. And thanks, too, to all the Undies and especially all the fans who support them. Without you, this revolution doesn’t happen.

Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman calls webcomic Achewood (which is, perhaps, the best comic strip in American history) the best graphic novel of the year, noting “(i)t’s not a graphic novel in every, or maybe any, traditional sense, since its primary venue is the Web, but Achewood is so profoundly genius it would be a crime to put it anywhere but on this list, and at the top of it.”

I can’t disagree, and judging by the amount of “What We Need More of is Science” shirts I see in the office, I’m not alone. Not only is the content genius, but creator Chris Onstad also offers some of the most innovative merchandise to ever be inspired by a comic strip about cats and teddy bears living in Southern California — shirts are a no-brainer, but you can also buy hot sauce, umbrellas, and pint glasses with the Achewood seal of approval. (Or, in the case of Roast Beef, the Achewood seal of apathy and dysthimia.)

Also, check out the reference to Achewood in a recent Cat and Girl strip. Dorothy Gambrill, the creator of Cat and Girl, is another undependent hero — we’ll talk about her innovative Donation Derby idea in a later post, but for now, take a look at her own original merch, including a t-shirt written in Icelandic, an Ozymandias trophy (score!), and a sticker with perhaps the best observation about the World Wide Web ever: “If television’s a babysitter, the Internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.” My birthday’s December 27. I’m just sayin’.

Meet the new Undependent.com. Underneath the hood, it’s still Wordpress, but in the world of new blogs (as in life) we all know it’s really what’s outside that truly counts. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Nicolò Volpato and GNV Partners for their great work.

We chose the minimalist color scheme to emphasize that it’s not about us.

Our focus is squarely on others, on those creative individuals and companies who have chosen to make their Internet audience their primary audience. Those who recognize that working with the Internet medium to interact with a real, known audience doesn’t mean they’re unable to cut it in the real world.

It’s also about a lot more than just control. It’s about an entirely new level of personalization made possibly by direct interaction. The old mass produced content-delivery vehicles like compact discs, books, dvds, they’re all dissolving away before our very eyes. Radiohead’s latest album, with its “pay what you want on the Internet FIRST” credo, has shown the virtual irrelevance of the tradition radio-driven record sales model. Even still, it’s the number one CD for sales. Similarly, the imminent announcement of movie rentals on iTunes is not only firing another round into the heart of traditional mass-market movie rental chains like Blockbuster, it’s even obviating the “rent today and get your DVD in 3 days” model made popular by Netflix. Amazon knows what’s going on, their core sales of Books, Movies and CDs are completely threatened by this new model and that’s why they’re out there doing Digital Music Downloads, Amazon Unboxed and now that Electronic Book thingamajig that gots some recent hype but surely can’t be as cool as the iPod to which they compared it.

In saying this, I’m not saying anything new. Everyone is trying to figure out who will be left standing in the massive all out war going on between Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Netflix, Youtube, Walmart and all the other juggernauts. Musical chairs is well underway and yet it’s still anyone’s guess who will ultimately capture the flags called “audiences” and enjoy a century as the next media oligopolists.

But amidst this battlefield of juggernauts, at their very feet, hundreds, thousands of human beings are scurrying forward as well. They too are after the flags, and many of them are actually already running with one in their hands. Many don’t even appear on radar despite the fact that they count hundreds of thousands of people as audience members. Maybe they pop up in the occasional story here and there but most don’t get the time of day from traditional media. It doesn’t matter because they’re not talking to them anyways. They’re talking to their audiences and their audiences know their voices.

The Internet enables this massive disintermediation and for the time being, this seems like a good thing. At the advent of television people imagined using this awesome new technology to educate the masses. Who knew, at best, it would produce something more like “The General.” Every major technology is always sold with some idealized watercolor of its potential benefits to mankind, much like every piece of soon-to-be-developed piece of land sells buyers with some illustrated fantasy of the finished project. It never goes like that. And in fact, the Internet enveloping and reintermediating human relationships could ultimately prove to be a bad thing. (No less than Marshall McLuhan warned, in the paraphrasing of WIRED Magazine:

McLuhan’s idea that media are extensions of man was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan’s mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God.

But McLuhan did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later decided that the electronic unification of humanity was only a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was “a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.” Satan, McLuhan remarked, “is a very great electric engineer.”

So the Internet has THAT going for it…

But thankfully, we’re not at the point in the life of the medium where we’re handbasketed and hellbound… at least, I don’t think we are. We at Amplifier peg this as the still pre-Golden age. It’s more like the chaos of early radio or tv. New and significant accomplishments are being made all the time and doubtlessly the Internet has produced its first generations of original artists who have succeeded in capturing their own sometimes-quite-massive audiences. But they’re still just getting started. Folks are still playing with the various possibilities much like any artists do in the embryonic phase of a new medium. That’s what we’re about and that’s WHO we’re about.

Undependent wants to bring you these artists and creators along with their works, best practices, and accomplishments. By covering these “undies” we hope we can help shed new light on advancements in the state of a very new art. Watch this space, we’ve just turned the key, the heater is still blowing cold. Within the year we want to make Undependent a truly indispensable source for news for the very people we cover. As the graphic in the post says we want you to “see how they run.”

Talk to you soon.

jef

NICHOLAS GUREWITCH ON THE PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP – NEWSARAMA

The Perry Bible Fellowship, named for a random church in Perry, Maine, has very little to do with the Bible. In fact, laughing at the strip’s outrageous dark comedy might make you worry that you’re going to Hell.

The brainchild of 25-year-old Nicholas Gurewitch, the comic has become a runaway hit since he began it in college in 2001. It’s grown to appear in more than 20 newspapers, Maxim magazine and of course on its own web site. Now, it’s poised to conquer the publishing world with The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, a hardcover collection from Dark Horse Comics. Already a bestseller, it’s the perfect introduction to Gurewitch’s world of doughy humans, sarcastic aliens, and really, really horrible things happening. We chatted with Gurewitch about his strip’s success, his inspirations, and just how he creates his horrifying hilarious strip.

Awards Announced For Europe’s First Machinima Festival // GamesIndustry.biz
The first machinima festival to be held in Europe took place at DMU in Leicester and in Second Life this weekend (12-14 October) and included a packed awards ceremony which recognised some of the best talent in this quickly-growing genre.

Machinima is a fusion of film-making and computer gaming, which is increasingly used as a quick and cost-effective way to create animated films and has a rapidly growing following. See www.machinimaeurope.co.uk for more info…

Burnie Burns and Jason Saldana of Rooster Teeth Productions, makers of the popular online sitcom Red vs Blue, performed during the festival and took part in panel discussions.

Click through to read the full article. Get to know these creators and their work. Buy their stuff.

Winners included:

• Best Picture, Best Visual Design, & Best Direction: Stolen Life by Nanoflix Productions
• Best Series: Grid Review
• Best Technical Achievement: Machinima Island
• Best Experimental: Cirque du Machinima, Cuckoo Clock
• Best Student Film: Machinima! with Officer Dan
• Best Story: Snow Witch by Britannica Dreams

Related readings:

• The Future of Machinima, Business Week
• Wikipedia entry on machinima