Perfection. In an age of digital archives, tagging, and immediate retrieval of any clip, blatant contradictions and flip flopping talking points are just going to make you look STUPID.
Popularity: 63% [?]
This is the first time I’ll be voting for a candidate, not voting against another.
The game changed in ‘60 when Kennedy faced Nixon on television. Kennedy and his folks understood the medium, and understood how to better use it. They had conscious competence of the most important medium of the day.
2008 is the first presidential election in which a candidate’s team has a conscious competence of the newest and most powerful medium: the internet (see below). McCain is going to be crushed.
This is a candidate that understands my generation, my technologies, and is of my world view. Fuck yeah I’m voting for Obama.
Popularity: 68% [?]
I had to bring my digital camera to work the other day to take some pictures of the building for a contractor. I was at work when I realized this, so I decided to use the power of google calendar to my advantage. I popped open my web browser, made an entry for 5:40am, and set a reminder to be sent to my phone via text message.
The next morning, I’m up at 5:30am getting ready for the gym, brushing my teeth, getting clothes together, checking email, and WHAM, my cell phone goes off, I get the reminder and throw the camera into my bag. Success.
I’ve had similar success before, but for some reason this time it really hit me how damn cool what happened actually was. In reality, my mindfulness in one moment translated into increased mindfulness in another. The second my phone started buzzing, I knew exactly what it was for before I even looked at the screen. The entire rhythm of my morning changed, and not just because it reminded to get my camera, but that it also reminded me to be aware. That moment the day before was connected to my moment that morning in a weird sort of time travel, and I suddenly found myself present in both moments.
I’ve always been fascinated by the feeling obtained in that state; in school days I used to giddily skip 50 pages ahead in notebooks and leave myself notes, knowing I’d stumble across them much later in the year. There’s something about time realization that always causes an immediate perspective shift for me, as I however briefly find myself suddenly occupying both the present moment and whatever moment the initial time trigger was created in. I suppose it’s a type of presence across time, an immediate felt body realization of the fact that there really only ever is one moment, and that’s right now.
Presence across time is something that has only really become a possibility with the birth of new technologies. In years passed, the only traces of a person left would be bones, and the memories of those that new them.
The emergence of art & writing took this to a new level, now bits of experience were left on cave walls or in books, which themselves might decay over time. Now we have the digital age, an age of bits and bytes which are seemingly immune to time. Suddenly, anything ever written or written henceforth has no reason to ever disappear, and is instantly available to everyone. Stuart Davis mentioned how this was affecting modern artists once when we were in the car. In his case, how not only does he have to compete with other up and coming bands, but he’s competing with all music created through time. Someone might choose to listen to Bach instead of him even easier than turning on the radio used to be. The growing attention economy is hard on mediocre works……creations that may have been minor hits in their time likely won’t even be a blip in the oncoming wave of information and media..
Mindfulness & Attention; now weaving through time in novel ways. good days to be alive.
Popularity: 40% [?]
I’ve got a lot of music on my computer. Just hunting for a song a few minutes ago, and found myself in what’s basically my ‘random singles’ folder on my D: drive. Basically it’s a folder full of songs I don’t have the rest of the album for. Some are individual tracks off full albums (pre-itunes you used to have to buy the whole crappy cd for that one great radio track) and others are songs I’ve never had the full album for.
Anyways, because I’m a clever obsessive fuck, I haven’t really ‘gotten’ a new computer since 1998. Since then I’ve been copying my hard-drives, only upgrading the OS. This means files that aren’t OS related have their original time-stamp creation date intact.
So I’ve kinda got a diary of my life based on these tracks. Kinda weird, especially when I started looking at the dates and realized I could remember a bit about some of the days. Some highlights:
Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World.mp3 - 10/28/1998. This, along with many other tracks obtained that day, were in preparation for the Halloween Party I had Senior Year of high school. I had the computer going straight to the stereo, uber playlist. Cutting edge. I was elvis (said costume has been re-prised many a times despite never really being long enough in the legs…)
Scatman John - Scatman.mp3 - 11/23/1998. This was when I was working at AFFECT, an educational non-profit setup to give smart computery young kids work. We used to listen to it there which must have prompted me to download it for reason!
Bob Marley - Three Little Birds.mp3 - 03/18/1999. Ben Kimpel made me a best of bob marley disc at some point. That’s where this is from.
Sprung Monkey - Get Em Outta Here.mp3 - 12/15/1999. My first semester at College I saw Kelly on and off, from san diego. She liked this song which was from a band down there…
Tracy Chapman - Telling Stories.mp3 - 02/15/2000. Went to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno live taping with Jamie Lofgren. She played this song off her new album. I liked.
Oasis - Go Let It Out.mp3 - 04/07/2000. They used to play this video all the time in the Northridge crappy student union.
Wilco - How to fight loneliness.mp3 - 08/20/2000.Went to a Pearl Jam show in Indiana that summer with Seth, Peter, and Peter’s brother. On the long drive back I remember hearing this song in a semi-lucid dream state as it blared through the car.
Joe Cocker - Feelin’ Alright.mp3 - 10/15/2000. My friend Ricky was on exchange from Germany in Santa Cruz. I think she had just broken up with her boy, so I made her a happy cd.
Stephen Stills - TreeTop Flyer.MP3 - 10/18/2000. KPIG played this on a saturday Brett and I drove down to the Flea Market, which was also that drive in theater!
Theme - Muppet Show.mp3 - 11/29/2000. I had to download it for a project I had in MUPPET MAGIC. that’s right, I got COLLEGIATE CREDIT for that shit! But Jim Henson did become a profound personal and artistic role model for me after learning about him in that class. Holy shit, here’s the project! (open in a new tab)
Lamb - Goreki.mp3 - 03/11/2001. The Duchess, becky beeson, the girl of the time had me download this…
Tommy James And The Shondels - Draggin’ The Line.mp3 - 06/29/2001 Nate Cooper, a fellow film student from Santa Cruz, visited me in chicago that summer. We ate at ed debevics and they played this song while i was there.
Robert Plant - Big Log.mp3 - 08/16/2001.heard this on the shitty little clock radio in our bathroom on rock 103.5 during a shower after a night of volleyball- i think.
Neil Young - Love & Only Love.mp3 - 10/21/2001. Immediately downloaded this after my first live exposure to neil and this song at The Bridge School benefit.
Kenny Loggins - Conviction Of The Heart.mp3 - 11/21/2001. No IDEA why I got this then, but I seriously remember dancing to it in our living room in 5th grade, after Mrs. Heilbronner had us learn it to sing on Earth Day.
The Last Dragon (Soundtrack) - The Last Dragon.mp3 - 01/10/2002. George Stavrias, one of the coolest aussie’s i’ve known, and I deeply bonded over this film on a sunday movie night during my RA days! We watched the whole F’in commentary!
Shakira - Whatever Whenever.mp3 - 04/14/2002. One of the most popular songs played at the clubs when we went down to mexico for spring break that year. Yes, the year of the “incident” and the blacking out on the beach thing…
Kylie Minogue - Love at the first sight.mp3 - 10/1/2002. One of the most popular songs played during my whole summer trip in Europe. guess it took me a while to get it.
At this point some hard drive crashes fuck things up - a bunch of songs got written over with dates in ‘05. those songs still trigger memories but without the dates I won’t bother writing about them.
Kinda weird, writing about those days made me remember a lot more than I ever thought I did.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Today I just happened to notice I hit ONE GIG in my gmail. Not much for some, but that’s a shit load of email for me. Especially when I remember going to CompUSA and buying a 1 gig drive to use for video editing back in 1997 or so. That shit was like $150, and I’ve now filled the equivalent of that hard drive with emails, most of which I’ll never read again. I’m not exactly sure that’s progress, but it is damn interesting.
And now that I actually think about it, I see the appeal in having every email I’ve ever sent, just in case I ever need to go back and find some crucial piece of information. Realistically though, I rarely search my gmail account for any piece of information more than a month old, so how useful are all those other emails I have?
I opened my gmail in late september ‘05 just before going to the UK/Germany for a short trip. Alan Alvarez gets the honor of first email in my account, hitting me up asking if I still have his Warhammer 40k discs. Yeah, i play video games, and i love them.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Had this idea last thanksgiving, talked with Stan about it a bit when he played with SongTales, and nearly forgot about it.
Was just now browsing over Facebook’s “Social Timeline” again. Somewhat nifty, but more or less useless. It’d be kick ass if they took it one step further and basically made it into a “calendar” that integrated the “events” function, and also allowed you to openly add PAST events and moments in time.
Things like Casey’s 30th Birthday, Niles’ wedding, The Chocolate Cake fight, the day I moved to Boulder, when my cat died, all seminal events in my life, could be added. This ‘date’ then becomes a wiki entry of a sort, with a general description of the evening, then comments by Approved attendees where they can post written recollections of the night, upload tagged photos, videos, etc…
Suddenly you could get lost for hours stumbling through your friends lives and events, and likely discover simple things like the girl you’re now dating was actually at that party before you knew each other, that you were only passed out on the beach in mexico for 15 minutes, or god knows what else. Integrate the memories in the social space. I think it’d be cool. I’ll make sure to ‘tag’ you in the memor-entry for when I wrote this blog post and you read it.
Popularity: 51% [?]
Do you Twitter? If not its time you should start, twittering is the new blogging. (it was even started by the creator of Blogger.com)
The premise is real simple: You have 140 characters to type what you’re doing at the moment, and you can input via the website, text message, or instant message. You then receive ‘twitters’ from all your friends in any of the same mediums.
Why is this cool? Writing two sentences takes no time at all, isn’t hard to do, and consequently means you’re more likely to do it. Lower barrier of entry means anyone can twitter throughout the day when doing the things they already do.
What does this create? Apparently they’ve dubbed the twitter affect “ambient intimacy”, meaning you know what’s going on with your friends in a PASSIVE sense, without having to talk to them all the time. twittering has already scored me a ride home from the airport and led a friend to meet us for Lebowski at the boulder theater last night. Over the last few years I’ve often logged into AIM or Gtalk not because i necessarily had anything to say to my friends, but because it was just comforting knowing they were ‘logged’ in and there. Twitter is a natural extension of that.
Plus, just think how much LESS boring phone calls with friends will now be. You’ll actually have some stuff to talk about as you’ll each have at least a vague idea of what the other has been up to, and can quickly move on to the shit that really matters instead of the boring weather/hows work bs.
So yeah, twitter: harnessing the power of the web to bring those farther apart closer together.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Not only do I love the Daily Show/Colbert Report for the insightful political humor, but I also love each because of the way they play with media. The Daily Show for its powerful editing techniques, and now the Colbert Report for successfully combining Broadcast media with User generated media into an amazing loop:
Checkout the Stephen Colbert Lightsaber challenge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t27FxaHgvM8 (original footage)
And some of the many responses! (the best ones get shown on the show!)
Popularity: 14% [?]
