It's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I guess that's true; it's also said that talent borrows, and genius steals. If that's the case, then these kids at Neen are absolute Einsteins:
Look familiar? Um, maybe like this?
Which would have been fine --
Mike made it anyhow, and it's not like the drawing tools in Flash are so complicated that no one else can figure out how to do this -- but the beautiful kicker is that I only became aware of these jokers after I got an email from them saying...
This is Miltos Manetas. Sometime ago I discovered your http://img.stamen.com/drawing/ and I used it to create www.jacksonpollock.org.
we are working now on a new version of it and I would be very grateful if you could please send me the .fla of that piece. We want to modify it in such a way that you will be able to draw multiple lines...
...which translates to "we took your work without asking, put it on a web page with our name on it, and buried your name in the meta tag and the credits (which you get to by hitting the space key, in case you were wondering, since we don't indicate this anywhere on the page). we want to make some changes to it -- but we're too lazy to figure out how to do it ourselves, or even try -- and can you send us the source files so that we can play with them?"
A protesting email from me saying "don't you think this is kind of lame?" resulted in the following stellar defense, from an intellectual giant of the first order:
Please, try to understand the way we work at Neen: we consider all visual/audio material as everybody's property. It's more cool like that.
Hah. I'm not really as upset as I sound. When someone steals your work outright, you've achieved a certain level of success, I suppose. Had to happen sometime. I love it though: "It's more cool like that." Who's teaching the kids how to write these days?
