Madman's Mutterings

A pretty amazing thing just happened. Someone (and yes, it’s the someone in the picture), saw what they perceived to be an injustice and did something about it. Have a look. It’s not every day that people stand up and speak out against injustice, especially when the “wronged party” is quite capable of speaking for themselves.

Aric tells an interesting story here, made doubly so for me because I find myself at the center of it. He gets a few of his facts wrong, but not enough to alter the fundamentals. I made a show and flew to Shanghai to pitch it. Almost a year later a similar show aired on the site of the people that I pitched it to. Exactly how similar I leave to you. In my own mind, I categorized it as “Clearly Derivative, But Not Maliciously Stolen.” A lot of that decision comes from knowng John Pasden, the guy who saw my show and later on went on to do his own.

But that story is being told over in Aric’s blog. That’s not what I wanted to focus on here. What’s important to me is that Aric didn’t wait to see if I was taking care of it. He didn’t wait for permission or… heh… get all the facts. If he’ll forgive the comparison, he reminded me tonight of my dog, Max, when a stranger’s hyperactive pup had snapped at my face one day at the dog park and BOOM. Suddenly Max was there and had body-checked the offending pooch onto his keister. Max stood there with his chest puffed out, ready for a fight. In the photo above, Aric is puffing in, but I think the analogy holds.

In both cases, they’re exactly the kind of friend a guy hopes to find when they have let slip the dogs of war.