I’ve been busy over the holidays doing the usual things: wrestling with trees in the living room, eating too much, enduring overlapping fractured conversations in rooms full of simultaneously speaking family members and stuff like that.
During that time I’ve also been reorganizing my office/edit suite and lining up my production agenda for the coming year.
This will include all the upcoming efforts I’ll be applying to the Ruffus Project as a whole – including a slate of new episodes made exclusively for release on the web and a series of print-to-order books based on the original shows. That post will be put up here soon – I promise.
I’m also in the process of setting up a whole new blog site at robbomills.net which will – eventually – take over from this site. Millsworks will fade away and get archived somewhere but I’m not going to worry about that right now.
Both of those projects evolved from our creative incubation process with the Rhino Group – a semi-weekly gathering of our core colleagues at Parkdale’s Rhino Bar & Grill.
More ambitious plans lay in wait for some longer form projects and I’m looking forward to being able to reveal them as they get closer to reality.
On top of all that I’m also looking for some kind of job because none of these works are paying my salary – yet.
There’s a lot of commentary I want to offer up since we are entering the year where the War On The Internet truly erupts. The Occupy Movement which sprang from the Arab Spring is just the tip of the iceberg of the disruptive nature of social media and the new ability of citizens to bypass traditional corporate and state controlled media to receive and disseminate information and culture. The interwebz hold the distinct possibility to make fundamental changes in how not just our individual lives are lived but how we as human beings think, operate and interact with each other and the planet we share. That’s big stuff. And believe it or not, kids puppet shows – and other offerings from indie producers like myself – have a place in all that. We are at the cusp of “use it or lose it” with respect to the Net – and also, believe me, of “defend it or die”.
That material will have a better home on the new RobboMills site.
There are many others playing in the same cultural media sandbox as yours truly. I’m privileged to know and work with quite a few remarkable people here in Toronto who are increasingly active in establishing what we do online as a serious industry. You’ll be hearing more about them too. They are awesome.
But – between now and then I have to get all the shit in the boxes on my office floor up on the shelves, all the spaghetti of wires under/over/across my standing desk organized into a reasonable facsimile of a non-combustible electrical array, all my outstanding contracts and other legal documents vetted and signed, and I think there’s also this little thing called back taxes.
Blah blah blah. There’s always going to be something to do.
Soooooooo – bear with me as I get my proverbial shit together and we’ll have a fun and entertaining ride in Robbo’s culture bucket from now to the end of 2012. What happens after that is between you and your local faux-Mayan bullshit distributor.
Predictions for the coming year? Everything is going to get very dark and scary and mean and bloody – and there will be puppets. Keep smiling, tell the ones you love that you love them, and speak out loud against lies, intolerance and hypocrisy. And eat more vegetables.
And now – here’s a video of a crow tubing on a rooftop.
Having a blog fills me with a sense of obligation – and resultant despair when I fail to oblige. I used to plough out 3 to 4 posts per day when I first started my blog a few years ago but that has since tapered off to a more reasonable 1 per day – or so.
Lately I’ve been remiss and haven’t kept up with the flow of information across the smoothed rocky shores of my mind. I like going to that water’s edge to draw a drink for you to share but I haven’t been able to the past few weeks because I’ve just been so damned busy.
I am still working on the post for the Ruffus The Dog Christmas Carol – and I’m writing scripts for a children’s series for a friend because it’s fun and it pays the rent – and I was working on a proposal for a new web series called My Kitteh! which is a collaboration with my talented wife Karen Valleau which promises to be lots of fun – and I’m making plans for another production which I hope to fund and put before the cameras before the year is out.
And I’m also looking for other revenue generating work.
So, as you can see, it’s been challenging to do all of the above and follow an exercise regime I’ve convinced myself is necessary to stay alive and mobile and keep up with the blogging too.
This week requires a great deal from me but next week I should have enough free moments in my usual ADHDay to plant some brain seeds here for you to watch grow into something resembling a better metaphor than what I attempted to make work at the beginning of this sentence.
See? I can’t even write.
Too busy.
More later.
Cheers.
P. S. Speaking of monkeys – here’s Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” – enjoy!
Today I posted this short video as part of our last efforts to raise productions funds through IndieGoGo for “Ruffus The Dog’s A Christmas Carol”.
The process of using IndieGoGo has been interesting and I’m pretty sure it will prove to be useful for other projects we come up with in the future. Our initial goal was for $8,500 which was a painfully low amount considering how ambitious this production has become. With only 5 days left to our IndieGoGo deadline we have only managed to secure about 20% of our goal – but we’re forging ahead with production regardless.
I’m sure I could have done a better or more aggressive job of promoting our efforts to raise funds but all excuses and caveats aside – I’m a puppeteer, dammit! We did manage to get a very nice mention in BoingBoing which helped draw a lot of attention to all this nonsense we’re up to.
Luckily, I’ve been blessed with a team of friends and colleagues who are both dedicated and talented. Their generous contribution of time and skill will be what makes our version of “A Christmas Carol” really shine.
Our shoot days are coming up fast and I’m looking forward to the four days of hilarity and hard work that lie in store for all of us.
The miraculous Jane Edmondson, assisted by Tatiana Hernandez-Deutsch, has been creating wonderful miniature ealry Victorian wardrobe for our cast of puppet characters. And our designer, Karen Valleau is crafting new puppet characters and just finished an exquisite snowglobe with St. Paul’s Cathedral inside.
Earlier this evening I had a Skype call with our composer, JP Houston – he’s currently in L.A. recording and rehearsing for a European band tour – and he’s been sending me demo tracks of the songs for this production and they are frickin’ awesome. Unfortunately he won’t be able to come to Toronto for the song recording sessions so we’ve been organizing a back-and-forth effort with him sending tracks here – we record the vocals and send them back – and so on and so forth until my brain melts out my ass.
It’s all fun and games until someone’s brain melts out their ass.
And for those who know me well – today I found myself alone in the kitchen making production sketches – and involuntarily let loose with one of those maniacal laughs.
Felt good.
Please, do what you can to help us out – or at least encourage others to help – every little bit is greatly needed and appreciated. The finished show WILL released online on December 21st. So there.
Here’s the original IndieGoGo pitch video:
And here, of course, is the widget that leads you to our IndieGoGo pages:
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go edit some footage of Sinbad the Sailor and these two pigs, Ray & Harry, the Hausen brothers.
I’ve been trying to get a bunch of things done these past couple of weeks – one of which is a project we want to launch on the crowdfunding site Indie Go-Go. The launch should have been last week and then was postponed to tomorrow. While I’m still going to give meeting that deadline the ol’ college try you’ll all have to remember – I didn’t finish college.
But I am gonna finish this, dammit. I just need to catch a couple of more shots and then finish the edit. Piece of cake. Yeah right. Famous last words.
To give you some idea of the nonsense I’ve gotten myself into here’s a glimpse at the script and my usual thumbnail scribbles for storyboards. I use these to keep track of the multiple elements that have to come together within any given shot and it serves me well in the edit too.
When we were shooting the Ruffus television series I’d often make up these thumbnail sketches on the studio floor – between shots. What a dickead! Shot list? What the fuck is that?
An average moment during the shoot went something like this: “Stand over there and pretend you’re looking at a door. Perfect. Roll tape. Cut. That’s a keeper. Moving on. What? Whaddaya mean: What just happened? Keep up for fuck’s sake. Next set up!”
It was actually a little more organized than that – but not much – and certainly not by me.
This Indie Go-Go pitch is the last of these multi-role videos I’ll be making for a while. It hurts my brain – and my arm. I’m getting old. Next time will involve a lot more people – and a lot more talent.
Hopefully it will all be done before the end of tomorrow.
A little while back I posted about Making A Ruffus Promo where I described a little bit of the antics involved in shooting and editing a short promotional video to announce new episodes released on the Ruffus The Dog web site.
Well – I did another one:
This time it involves 3 characters and so was, naturally, just a tad more time consuming to make than the previous one. But not because there was an extra character.
The excess production time was caused by me fucking up.
I thought I was being clever in this little exercise of quick and dirty shooting – set it up, knock it in the can, cut the fucker together and throw it out on to the interwebs. Ta-dah! Piece of cake. Yeah – right.
My son helped me with the shoot – operating camera and performing the right hand of the pig character. Took us less than an hour to get all the shots we needed. It was fun – even though we shot the scenes on one of the hottest days of the year and my sweat was dripping on the computer keyboard the whole time.
My sweat wasn’t the problem. It’s because I’m an overly confident lazy bastard that caused the problems. I have old hard drives – they need to be updated – yeah, yeah, sure, someday maybe. I back things up – sometimes – when I get around to it – maybe later when I’m not so busy – just let me get this one thing done first.
You get the picture.
Nothing too complicated – and it only took me 2 hours to cut and composite the whole thing.
That’s when I noticed we missed a line and had to set up all the lights and camera and shit – again – to get this one integral little fucking line from the pig. Geez.
No worries. Shit happens. Got the shot. Imported it into the edit. I’m feeling pretty cocky at this point. In a couple of hours the render will be finished and I’ll post this puppy and gloat it about it on Twitter and Facebook. I am too cool for school.
I got all the way to the end of the final edit on this shit and was just going to do one last pass to tweak the audio a bit when suddenly Final Cut Pro started telling me I had files that were off-line. That’s how FCP describes something important that just isn’t fucking there anymore. Off-Line.
What?! How is this possible?! Of course the files are there. I put them there. Right there – there – where there is now n-o-t-h-i-n-g.
The screams were heard all through Parkdale – and across the Twitterverse – that night.
Where did they go? I have no fucking idea. For all I know they just floated away with all the sunshine I’d been blowing up my own ass.
I proceeded to spend over 12 hours attempting to recover the files – even tempting the fates by going into the Terminal in a desperate bid to reconstruct the files via command line. Eventually I had to admit defeat and a few days later – this time without the help of my son who had returned to school – re-shot the entire thing.
This time I backed up the files. This time I saved everything – twice – and on different drives. This time I did it right. And it worked – sort of. It doesn’t possess the verve of the first shoot and the edit isn’t as finessed as the first one, largely because I was bored and pissed off with myself for wasting so much fucking time.
But I wasn’t just going to give up and do something else. Oh no. To me it was more important to actually get the thing done. It’s all part of a larger plan of mine that involves certain guerilla production techniques that (often) fly in the face of common sense. Backing Shit Up is now part of the plan.
Something else I did this time around was actually script the whole thing. I mean properly script it. I write scripts all the time for our shows but usually when I’m shooting something small like this I’ll just scribble down some notes and then wing it. It’s fun – what the hell.
This time I wrote it all down – just like a real shoot.
If you’re into that sort of thing you can download a PDF of the script. It’s not terribly clever – it’s just an exercise in production technique and an attempt to keep some original content flowing through the web site to maintain traffic.
The script is 4 pages for 2 minutes of screen time. There are some producers and broadcasters who live and die by page counts, refusing to even read scripts that defy their ironclad belief system in how long a script must be. Those people are pinheads. The running time of a script is based on how it plays. The little numbers in the corners of the paper don’t mean shit.
You’ll notice I wrote out each and every shot as it appears – with the exception of a couple because I fucked up the timing with the different characters speaking and had to fudge the edit to make it work – c’est la vie. When making the original Ruffus episodes – and for most of the shows I’ve produced and directed – I’ve always done this. It makes sense not to include all that kind of specific production detail when you’re just a writer-for-hire or trying to sell something on spec – then it makes sense to leave things open for readability and to let the other collaborators contribute their own vision to the process of crafting the finished story.
So should my script for a chintzy little 2 minute video have been only 2 pages long? No. Fuck that. Like I said: die hard page counters are pinheads.
Common wisdom sez a feature film script should be no more than 110-120 pages. Ever read a Hitchcock script? 250-300 pages. Of course, his scripts were detailed blueprints of exactly what he wanted to shoot and he was a freakin’ genius – and I’m no Hitchcock – but I do know if you toss one of those on an executive’s desk these days – they’ll plotz.
But, when you’re doing shoots that involve puppets and blue screen other stuff like that, and you don’t have a creative team on hand to figure shit out for you, and you don’t have a budget or the time to stand around with your thumbs up your arses trying to figure out the best way to accomplish the finished visual effect you desire – that’s when you simply write it down and say: “Shoot the fucker like that.”
Works for me – when I take the time to back shit up.
The next installment of this drivel will focus on how much crap I keep in my head as I work. That’ll be fun.
Cheers.
P. S. My friends and colleagues are, thankfully, telling me things like: “You know, if you ever need any help – all you gotta do is just call.”. I know! I appreciate that SO much. And YES – I will call. But first there’s still a couple of other things I need to mess around with before we move into a more collaborative frame of reference. Bear with me. And thank you so much for your support. :)
When I finally opened the Ruffus The Dog web site to the public I knew it wasn’t really finished – nothing ever is.
There are always changes, tweaks and inevitable corrections to be made as any site grows and gets road-tested by those who arrive first at the gates. There were some issues with bandwidth and file size for the videos – they tended to choke, stutter and endlessly buffer, thus degrading the viewing experience. I’ve made a few changes in that regard so it’s a smaller file size that plays on the web while still providing a broadcast quality version for download.
I suspect I may have to do some re-encoding to get the data rate just right so it all plays to my satisfaction.
There are also download links now for the episodes (in a variety of formats) so the shows can be viewed freely on other devices. I wish that functionality was built right into the player but since it’s not I need to provide it for each post on the site. Fair enough.
Eventually there will be more outlets for the full episodes – YouTube, Vimeo etc. – and I’ll likely use a service like TubeMogul to make placement of the files easier. Right now I’m content to do everything by hand so I can get a better grip on the formats, file sizes and general layout before attempting to automate the process. One step at a time.
There are also new badges which link to the Twitter and Facebook pages for Ruffus.
Overall I’m not completely satisfied with the graphic layout of the site – I want to keep playing with some ideas – but it was important to finally get it out there for everyone else to see, otherwise I’d be fiddling with it for an eternity. First thing is to make sure all the basic bells and whistles work with a minimum of fuss and bther – then I can do more work on making it pretty.
Tomorrow I’ll be posting two more episodes: Ruffus & Hyde and our own version of The Frog Prince. After that it will be one new show each week – usually on a Tuesday.
Once I get into a comfortable routine of posting episodes I can concentrate on more Behind-The-Scenes material and the writing of the Storybooks.
Cheers.
P. S. I won’t be offering many caveats for the shows themselves – there’s a lot of good shit in Ruffus The Dog – but I feel obliged to mention that the late Karen Ohland, one of our key puppet builders, absolutely despised the Little Jane puppet and kept asking if we could re-shoot the entire episode just so we could change that character.
I’ve posted in these pages – and the previous incarnation of this blog – about the unique and rapidly evolving blend of our technical senses and our immediate surroundings, which we quaintly refer to as “the real world”. Awareness of this extension of our senses has grown enough to give it a catchy name: Augmented Reality. Like all such phrases it tries to explain the whole thing while managing only to scratch the surface and still come off sounding like something a plumber does for $100 an hour while showing off the crack of his ass.
“Okay, Robbo, what is Augmented Reality and why should I give a shit?”
I’m so glad you asked.
This has become a longer blog post than post than most, with a pant load of embedded videos (and juicy links that you must follow or I’ll come to your home late at night and read them out loud to you) because there’s a lot of information and examples connected with the ideas behind AR. What I present here is by no means definitive. How could it be? All of this seems to be evolving faster than I can type. What I posit here merely gives a sketch of what I see happening and some consequences for us to consider.
Here we go.
Augmented Reality – or “AR” as it is also known (and I fucking hate the over use of acronyms in this dirt stupid KFC, McD, ROTFLMAO world of ours) – is the use of technology to enhance our senses and provide a richer experience of the world around us.
A simple cartoon example would be Steve Austin’s bionic eye in The Six Million Dollar Man that could zoom in with really cool “boo-boo-boo-boo-boo!” sounds. While we’re on the verge of having implanted tech just like Steve Austin the reality is more complex, not only in what can (and will) be implemented but also how these ubiquitously enhanced senses of ours will change how we live and behave in this world and consequently change what it means to be human.
One of the most vocal enthusiasts for augmented reality at the moment is Bruce Sterling who has been devoting the bulk of his recent blog postings to the subject and he can always be counted on to point out the deliciousness of fundamental transformative power coming soon to an eyeball, ear, tongue and brain really near you.
Here’s a keynote address Sterling gave a week ago at the Layar Launch Event in Amsterdam:
Thanks, Bruce, now let’s have a practical demonstration of what this funky augmented reality shit is all about.
I’ve posted Pattie Maes TED Talk here before but it’s worth putting up again because it pertains directly to what I am nattering on about. Maes is speaking of research she and her team at MIT have been doing on a project called Sixth Sense
Of course, it’s the abilities displayed in Pattie Maes talk that matter more than the cludgey gear slung around the neck of her colleague.
A lot of people see that video and immediately say: “Yeah, but who wants to go walking around looking like a dork with a big piece of shit hanging off them?” – oh, there are a few but the people who make that comment are completely missing the point.
It’s the context.
It’s the inherent idea that counts. The tech will inevitably, inexorably. become smaller and more wearable. How wearable? Remember Steve Austin and his “boo-boo-boo-boo-boo!” eyeball?
Until we get the Steve Austin Special – competitively priced well below the $6 million price break – we’ll just have to make do with our arms length windows on the world.
That would be our phones.
iPhones and all those who follow in its wake are the AR device du jour. The best known of the lot is NearestTube, which uses the GPS and compass capabilities of the iPhone to help you find the best route on the subway. But, to paraphrase the opening narration of the Six Million Dollar Man: “We have the technology, let’s abuse it.”
Issues of data-privacy aside (see Lawyers below) that’s some cool shit.
It seems these days everyone and their dog are trying to make the next best iPhone app but that’s a far cry from wearable, insertable, implantable AR tech, right?
Well – maybe.
Don’t go thinking that it’s only the big huge well funded mega tech companies and university labs that are coming up with all this cool shit. Another aspect of what makes this tech/sense evolution so cool is how it is burbling and fermenting in the myriad garage labs around the planet. Folks who, on their own time (a la the protagonists of the movie Primer), innovate in their home made laboratories – like part-time Dr. Frankensteins – crafting really wild ideas with readily accessible tech.
Some of this home-brew lab work is focused on genetics and that scares the hell out of me but since this is a happy happy joy joy blog post and we’ll save the “Oh god, oh god, we’re all gonna die.” blog post for another day.
Johnny Lee gave a great demo at TED where he showed what could be done by cheaply hacking the Wii remotes to craft all sorts of intriguing possibilities.
And when you add the Wii hacks to a 3D display and ultrasonic displacement you get a proto-type for a touchable hologram.
I know what you’re thinking and yes, porn in the future will be awesome.
Touching virtual bewbs is but one part of the equation. The true innovators – the ones who will be crafting the truly disrupting uses of AR – will be the folks working alone, in their basement or garage, unleashing what at first appears to be a simple game-like app built from readily available gear and quickly becomes adopted as a new and necessary way of seeing and interacting with the world around us.
Count on it.
Now let’s take this AR stuff a little further, shall we?
Look at the Microsoft Photosynth project.
Amassing the vast and continually growing library of images from around the world, collating them together and intuitively crafting a 3D representation of real world locales. Neat! What’s that got to do with AR?
Show up anywhere and layer on top images from every angle and across a span of time. Mix in a tad of that facial recognition shit and you have a playlist of who’s walked those streets you now tread upon or have gazed out the windows above you. The time of the place will hover over it just as surely as the light which meets your eyes as you gaze upon the actual real world structures. Time – history – formed not just from the perspective of Napolean’s winners but from the experience of any participant who happened to capture a sliver of their time in place, will hang like neglected Christmas lights from every location on the planet.
Make the media layers of AR richer and deeper and the passing of time itself will be reduced in meaning.
And then – there’s virtual worlds.
Oh shit.
I’ve blabbered on about this before. Look at the stuff I just showed you. Now take a more detailed 3D representation of Google Earth. Add the ability to travel that world with an avatar. Add the ability to connect the various virtual worlds together – and, yes, folks are actively working toward making this happen. Stir in any of your favourite virtual worlds. Mash ‘em up. Voila.
You can appear as an avatar in a virtual reality simulacrum of the world and transport yourself to a cafe on the other side of the world – a representation of a real cafe – and sit across from a friend who is actually there. They (and anyone else fitted with the tech) will see you sitting, perhaps ghost-like, in your chair at the table. What used to be called “spirit photography” would now be seen as the next wave of social media.
Personally, I just love the idea of the eventual merging of virtual worlds when World Of Warcraft guilds will storm the barricades of Second Life and decimate the entire place without ever once having to resort to any flying penises.
But that’s just me.
Our virtual worlds will augment our real worlds. The layers of virtual reality that can be woven with our perceived reality is stunning. The world is gonna become a fucking Hieronymus Bosch painting of hallucinations. It used to be just crazy people walked down the street, talking to themselves, seeing visions and walking into traffic. Now everyone’s gonna be doing it. What will the crazy folks do to distinguish themselves?
Speakin’ of crazy folks – let’s get into the shit.
Lawyers and marketers.
Oh yeah.
Let’s kick the marketers in the nuts first.
Folks in marketing say they are providing a service to both producers and consumers in this world by making available the information necessary for informed choices. Bullshit. They help sell crap. They help sell policy. Marketers are scum. I’m with Bill Hicks on this one:
The obtusely sociopathic marketing monkeys, the progeny of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, will forever seek ways to insert themselves and their message into the line-of-sight of your experience of this world. Like Chaplin in his first film, Kid Auto Races In Venice, or the scene stealing squirrel – but without the charm and humour – they will find and exploit any and every opportunity to get your attention. Mix that up with AR.
Walk down the street on a sunny day, observing the world through your AR filters, and you will see billboards change to suit your targeted demographic; store signs will be augmented to get your attention; directions to sponsored events will compete for display space – it will all get eyeball bleedingly irritating in a very very short time. Some locations will willingly make use of the tech to showcase their wares. Other locations will look forward to making a buck renting the AR space of their street or building to a series of targeted rotating ads.
Some locations won’t want to have these ads over-layed on the real world views of their buildings. Will they be able to opt out? If the net service you subscribe to sells any blank space available for advertising the actual owners of the space wouldn’t have any control of what gets presented in your AR view of the world. This is similar to what’s already going on with Rogers and other service providers who think they have a right to inflict themselves upon your transport through the net, replacing ads, redirecting traffic and generally acting like ignorant, arrogant, greedy douchebags.
You may not be able to escape the barrage of unwanted AR messages that will litter your world view like the road side billboards of yore.
Or would you?
Bring in the lawyers.
I’m usually with Billy The Shakes when it comes to lawyers. They’re fun to kick around – until you need one. But, for the most part, they’re about as beneficial to the growth of humanity as marketers (see Bill Hicks above).
Just as Stanislaw Lem loved to probe the ethics and legal ramifications of robots in our society, we would be well advised to get a preview of how AR will affect our jurisprudence of the senses as touched by AR.
It was a big deal back in the 1970′s when the concept of “air rights” came into being – the right to sell and trade in the real estate that hovered over the actual surface of owned land. Like the debt trades that have recently beggared America, the rights to open space could be bought, sold, and traded as needed. So too the rights to the AR space could conceivably become a viable economic model – controlling what can (and cannot) be augmented over a view of a physical locale. Issues of free speech will erupt – escpecially when vociferously pursued by a business agenda – when any controls are sought to reduce, replace or eliminate any undesired AR presence.
The DMCA, no doubt, will also be brought into play (just as abused as it is today) to prevent the unauthorized use of content, trademarks or logos – or to restrain any unfavourable AR commentary placed up a business. Visible and prominent comments – similar to what might be found on a blog but now hovering in the air in front of any given establishment – thumbs up or thumbs down, restaurant reviews or revealing corporate profiles that do not place a company in the best light could be posted and subsequently suppressed.
Is it free speech or is it graffiti? Where does your right to know stop and where does their right to inflict begin? Could instrusive AR marketing be considered spam? Is the pollution and overt control of your senses a viable claim for legal action? Will large and powerful interests be able to hold sway over how you see the world you would like to choose to see through the technology you choose to apply to yourself?
Yes, indeed, kill the lawyers before they impoverish us all – but not before we get laws passed in our favour.
It all sounds silly because it all seems so much of a cartoon right now, doesn’t it? But we must consider these implications of where our extended senses are leading us. We must anticipate the best and the worst uses to which humanity will employ these innovations.
The current battles being waged over who owns and controls the internet are, for the most part, narrowly focused on the desire of a few large corporations to maintain an old business model by making the internet become the new television versus the desire of human beings to express themselves and connect with each other on a truly global scale.
It would be good to remember the significant part of the AR acronym is the letter R.
Reality.
The internet isn’t television. Despite the proliferation of trivial distractions that threaten, as Neil Postman warned, to amuse ourselves to death, the true value, the true nature, the true destiny (if you will) of the internet is to make our real world more real to us. Once the technology becomes ubiquitous and becomes not something that sits outside of us but is an undeniable extension of who we are and how we experience this world then, and only then, will the really big ass disruption occur.
If you are lucky enough to be free to use this technology to transcend the boundaries of time and space and personal knowledge you will quickly and easily discover what it means to be human.
All other distractions will fade away.
I guarantee it.
Of course, I could be completely wrong and maybe we’ll just end up like a bunch of embryonic meat puppet slaves to the devouring robotic overlords of the Matrix.
Still – it would be more interesting than the drab and petty shit being inflicted upon us now.
I’ll leave the last word for Bruce Sterling in a talk he gave over a year ago about the ubiquitous nature of our technologies and where they are plausibly leading us. A little behind the times now, even after only a year of innovative development, but still a good primer for what I’ve been nattering on about.
Keep your eyes open folks – and look at what you choose to.
Cheers.
P. S. When I said: “Speaking of crazy – “ I did not mean to equate lawyers and marketers with people suffering from or coping with mental illness. That would be a wholly inaccurate and unfair depiction of anyone with a mental illness. My apologies.
P. P. S. Chris Grayson of GigantiCo left a comment on this article – you should check out his blog – he covers this territory in more detail and with greater aplomb than I. Thanks, Chris!
On Friday we head out east to visit my sister, her family and some very dear friends in Prince Edward Island enjoying the fresh air.
Speaking of fresh air -
While I enjoy the east coast breezes I shan’t be without the interwebs but I might get more lazy than I already am. Â So this is the post that says I’ll be out of town for a while.
If I remembered to pay the bills then this web site will stay up and running while I’m gone. Â If not — well then you won’t be reading this and it won’t matter.
Cheers.
P. S. Â In keeping with the photo above, I just had to post this video because the tune is very catchy. Â It’s Storm Large‘s song 8 MILES WIDE, from her hit one-woman show Crazy Enough and it was sent to me by Fred via The Bloggess.
Rheingold spoke at the Reboot Britain conference about 21st Century Literacies and he always gives good talks. His sometimes halting delivery is more than made up for in the depth and breadth of ideas he gently pries apart and reveals for our consumption and consideration.
This is a cool video Cory Doctorow posted over at BoingBoing. It’s just some neat footage of a neutrally bouyant balloon that is placidly hovering in a room.
A pink balloon.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for some time will know where this going.
Last year, over the Christmas holidays, I posted here (and on Twitter) about the plight of a small, homeless pink balloon named – appropriately enough – Pinky. I can’t replay the old blog post here because when I fucked up my blog it disappeared into the ether of the interwebs along with 2 to 3 years worth of mental gems and turds – but if anyone can find it for me I’d appreciate it. Nor can I lay out the original tweets – entitled Teh Saga Of Pinky – which inspired the blog post in the first place because apparently time to Twitter is like the flat Earth or the simulated reality of the button-eyed freaks in Gaiman‘s Coraline. Twitter Time is only visible within a limited distance after which it simply ceases to be and all sense of history drops over the edge into a timeless abyss and is lost forever.
But I digress.
Here’s what I can recount:
We had a small pink balloon show up on our doorstep in the midst of winter. It lingered there but we (myself and my immediate family) being heartless cretins, left it there – just to see what would happen.
It was a loyal balloon that stayed true to its desire to find a home with us until finally I could take it no longer and posted a series of tweets that ended with this picture and asked the question:
“Should we bring Pinky inside & offer protection from the elements – or should we let nature take its course?”
Note: For the record – TwitPic has all my photo posts still archived. Perhaps I should stick pictures with all my tweets from now on.
The response to my Twitter question was an undeniable “Yes! Rescue Pinky!” – and so I did.
In my original post I also tucked in a bit of blather about how human beings like to anthropomorphize things, imbue them with character and feelings, and all too often bestow our care and affection upon objects more than we do on other human beings in our midst. We are all some really fucked up monkeys.
While my original Twitter posts and blog entry have vanished forever I did manage to dig out of my email files this late night drunken missive I wrote to myself on the couch with my iPhone as a nudge to make the blog post the next day about Pinky:
For what is a balloon? Any balloon? It is but a container – a vessel of a moment in time – the encapsulization of the breath of life. And here we have this feeble artifact, this minor player in the grand theatre and parade of life – a lowly, singular, lonesome sagged pink balloon – a vessel of the breath of life constrained, held back, diminished, neglected, buried – and yet persevering against all odds, unrelenting in it’s obdurant determination to not just survive but to also be noticed, to be made note of, to be recognized, named and accepted. Each one of us may only play upon these doorsteps for the most brief of times and yet we are most definitely here and not to be neglected nor discounted nor, worse still, ignored – we are here – as in Horton Hears A Who – we are here, we are here, we are here!
One balloon serves as a rather frail and tepid metaphor for all the many things each of us may ascribe to the story. But it serves well enough -that lone sad semi-deflated rubber sack of air is all of us; it is what we are, how we are perceived and what we yearn to be.
One little balloon – on a doorstep – in a snowstorm.
What a wonderous world this would be when we are finally capable of setting aside the metaphors and allegories and heart warming images to clearly see that all of these stories – that all stories – are about us – about you and me – about us all.
Perhaps one day.
Until then we shall have to be content and find solace for our hearts in the tales of the trials and tribulations of a small pink balloon on a snowy doorstep.
Shortly thereafter my friend Jill Gollick also had an encounter with a pink balloon. She had been away for the holiday season but, via Twitter, got my posts about Teh Saga Of Pinky.
When she got home this was waiting at her doorstep:
I didn’t put it there.
Honest.
While Jill’s tale of Pinky The Second ended in horrible tragedy, our Pinky lived happily ever after.
But this whole errant pink balloon thing is starting to get on my nerves.
First me.
Then Jill.
And now this hovering version of the same.
Where are these balloons coming from? What do they want? Where is all this leading?
Perhaps time will tell.
But not Twitter time, of course – that’s too short.
Should you or anyone you know have any pink balloon stories to share with us please be sure to let me know.
In the meantime, here’s some balloons who don’t need rescuing.
I'm going to be slowly making some changes to the website both in format and content - and I'm pretty sure even the URL will change.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.