"But you do understand that the copyright law's intent is to encourage the creation of new works. With life plus 50 years, there are untold numbers of authors dead only 10 or 20 years who might be willing to rise and take a crack at just one more novel."

A recent comment by PPH on slashdot that i liked.
Source: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1212401&cid=27725525

I couldn't find an image of a Zombie Writer, but this poster image was gleaned from http://www.eons.com/blogs/entry/1166467-Midnight-Movies-2-8-Halloween-Zo.... It is from a 1932 film starring Bela Lugosi, and apparently was the first American production to feature zombies.

One of the many time-wasting activities a student can engage in is trawling through the 100s of comments attached to articles on sites like http://slashdot.org and http://torrentfreak.com and http://artstechnica.com. I can spend a whole morning doing this, and then it's lunchtime, so i can easily spend an hour preparing and eating food......and after 2pm it really is too late to start any serious thesis work, so I might as well catch a couple of episodes of something i've d/led, then it's time to go to the market and buy something to cook for dinner,... and before you know it another 6 months has gone by, and it's time to concoct the next "Progress Report" for uni.

I can't pinpoint why 'making thesis' is so different to 'making art' -- but for me they engage fundamentally different parts of my being, and whereas with art i throw myself in for months at a time, with study i throw myself out, and cannot manage more than a week or 2 of total obsession. Making art is like eating soul food, whereas this thesis business is a starvation diet. With only a few months left to finish the thesis, i STILL do not have one completed chapter..only a mess of fragments...