John Battelle has some interesting insight on "conversational media." This is a better term than "user-created content." The simple explanation is that conversational media is any sort of media published on the internet that isn't expressly for commercial purposes. My current favorite example:
Singing skeleton marionette


Hee hee, he dances and so does the pair of legs behind him. This sort of video has been around for a long time- the dancing baby, the Star Wars kid, and innumerable videos of cats are all examples. The dancing baby was originally intended as a demo for some prefab animation software, but nobody knew it. Conversational media is different from viral marketing in that the content is purely for enjoyment. If you clicked on the link above (then you're a geek like me), you saw the rundown of big media companies and their attempts to get in on web 2.0 content distribution. Newscorp bought Myspace, much to the chagrin of Viacom, for a hefty sum of money. Google bought Youtube with a built-in bugged for the wave of infringement lawsuits from big media copyright holders.
It seems to me that the short-term value of these assets is the ad revenue that comes from multiple users navigating through several pages of content, seeing new ads with each new page. Meanwhile, consumers are blocking and skipping advertising more and more. In light of this apparently growing trend, the web advertising model starts to look short sighted, if not willfully ignorant of the user base. However, I see these conversational media outlets as a great investment for trend watching. When a company owns the media servers, they can search and compile all kinds of data on what's popular while it's still popular.
Movie sites are popping up on Myspace now in order to connect with the target audience for the majority of studio films, and networks are using Youtube to market programming to an audience that has largely tuned out in the hope of getting their attention again.
And I just realized that I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's been on my mind for a while, since I did a project on the subject last year.

It got cold here in a hurry this year, after a pleasantly warm Thanksgiving week. I think we're fighting nature's population cap by living here at this time of year, but until we get satellite powered ubiquitous wireless internet, we're not leaving our northern population centers for warmer weather. I have the heater in my apartment blowing full-blast whenever I'm there and awake, though the effective radius is the size of an Ewok's strike zone. Sometimes when I'm cold and impatient I sit on the vent to warm my mostly uninsulated bones. Oddly enough, though it was turned off, I thought I heard it this morning. I assumed it was the neighbors, but then I found it running despite the switch being off. Apparently, there's a thermometer failsafe so I don't freeze to death in my sleep, which was rather considerate of the designer. If the thing didn't run on a pencil sharpener motor I'd call it good design.

Some people I know don't read (old joke), but those of you who do may be interested in this site: Unsuggester. Enter a book you've read, and the site will give you a list of books that you are statistically unlikely to read, based on site members' reading lists. It seems to be heavily weighted by people with lists of nothing but Christian/inspirational books, or perhaps I'm just a heathen for reading John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, and Douglas Adams.

Tom Waits was on Letterman last night. If you're interested in turkey vultures, watch the first video. Otherwise, the song is in the second video.
Tom Waits on David Letterman - Pt1


Tom Waits on David Letterman - Pt2

I'm getting back to normal now, not missing the bus and getting used to the food here again. I never noticed how used to the food I was, that everything tasted the same to me after two years of eating the same four meal combinations in rotation. The Terri Dreams project is coming along nicely. My segment director made a rough mockup video with the storyboards timed to the music for reference. I worked a little more on the models and messed around with blend shapes to get the right motion. If nothing else, it fills my time with something fun and constructive.

After work on Friday I drove home to Fort Wayne to greet my brother and a dozen other students known collectively as the Cornerstones, a vocal group from Kenyon College. I say "vocal group," because (a.) I don't think I've ever heard Michael refer to them as a "choir;" and (b.) their arrival could be described as "vocal." Semantic issues were quickly forgotten as two minivans and a station wagon all bearing the Kenyon crest filled our driveway and a flock of students began to emerge. A series of them greeted me with a hearty handshake and a name- a nice gesture even in the dark where I couldn't see their faces very clearly. An indoor reintroduction and a group 180° allowed Mom to read their group shirts with nicknames emblazoned on the back, each an inside joke born of camaraderie and caffeine. Cornerstone custom is to perform unannounced in a public area the night before the scheduled performance. Fort Wayne is almost completely shut down at 10:00 PM, save for an area in the Jefferson Pointe mall by the theater that served as a performance space. Even in the cold they managed to attract spectators. Most people paused to listen for a few minutes before moving on to someplace warmer, but a few guys sat on the steps nearby and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the show. I found that this unscheduled performance fit with my research from my immersion in Chicago: more than one person walking to or from the theater wondered aloud if these were carollers for the holiday, despite a lack of seasonal music. In a near sphere of commercialism and carefully metered culture, the Cornerstones were something unscheduled and genuinely independent. This garnered some predictably strange looks from older movie patrons, while the highschoolers seemed more accepting of a deviation from the norm. The concert the next day was great as well. I recorded the show on my Dad's laptop with a cheapo microphone from Radio Shack. They didn't have the one I wanted, but the recording might still be okay. I'll do what I can over break.

I'm pretty tired tonight, as I couldn't get to sleep last night on account of a still-huge stack of comic books saved up over the last month while I was away. I just feel the need to update this blog before it gets to be a month between posts.

It's been strange being back this past week. I wasn't gone to Chicago for that long, not a semester, certainly, but I've had to readjust to life here. The bus comes twice an hour, not every eight minutes. With the exception of Thai Smile, the Asian food isn't as good. I'm not in constant line-of-sight range with a Borders, Barnes and Noble, or other bookstore. If I was at all employable I wouldn't still be in Muncie. I'm quite sure I could live in a big city now.

I watched On the Waterfront the other night. It's entertaining and intelligent, despite a heavy-handed tendency to beat the audience over the head with every possible symbolic reference the writer could think of. It works, though. I also devoted two nights to working through Gears of War with Scott on his Xbox. Despite the immaculate level of detail afforded by next-gen graphics processing, the game still operates under the same principles of the eight and sixteen bit games of the past two decades: run around, blow stuff up, wait for the talking heads to run through their script to give some semblance of plot, repeat. Beyond the graphics, there really isn't much to the game. Plot and narrative issues are hard for designers to work out, but they're also the cheapest problems to solve early in the production process. It's why the Halo series takes so long between games- the designers care deeply about creating a world for the player to work in. This is also why the first Halo was still on the best seller list when Halo 2 came out.

Well, I'm here in Chicago now, so all my blogging for the next three weeks will be over here.

Sepultura Refuse resist
Nobody has ever rocked this hard in a pokemon shirt. If there was ever proof that music is good for kids, this would be it.

Every now and then an opportunity comes along here at BSU that allows me to do what I came here for- production and interdisciplinary learning. I'm working on an animated short for a giant project here called The Terri Dreams. The site explains it, but it's basically a series of five dreams. My part in this is the beginning of the second dream, with two pairs of lips and the universe. Or something. The segment director has it all planned out and storyboarded, and it doesn't look too complicated. (DN article)

I'm getting close to my cultural immersion. The brain trust that designed the DS program way back when decided to require a big expensive trip to a foreign culture. Sharper minds have since refined this to mean any culture that can be justified through rhetorical study (or somesuch). I'll be going to Chicago to study the art and music culture, and blogging the whole deal on a separate blog from this one. While I still can't shake the notion that this is essentially buying a grade, I am looking forward to the trip, as it is something I've always wanted to do somehow. Chicago is revered in almost hushed tones in Fort Wayne- if someone garners enough local acclaim for their creative endeavors, the buzz starts that they're going to Chicago to make it big. It's how 18th-century immigrants used to talk about America. I'll post a link to the immersion blog in the next week or so, once I find a good template.

Why? Because nature hates me. It's not enough to fill the outdoor air with pollen anymore. I woke up last week to find this on my toothbrush. Thanks to my morning disposition and indoor plumbing, it won't happen again. Now I need a little "Keep Off" sign for my new toothbrush. This is what I get for living next to ever-encroaching nature.

Barring postal holiday delay, Wednesday is new comic day. The day when all misanthropic sons of Krypton fully and gladly expect to shell out between three and thirty dollars for the latest dead-tree serialized entertainments. Today, though, as Gerry and I pulled in to the lot at Alter Ego Comics and approached the door, we were halted by a sign on the door stating that the shop was closed on account of the owner's daughter being born. We stood there for a minute, staring blankly into the dark window of a shop known for being well-lit. Even the neon Superman logo was turned off. We just stood there for a good two minutes, like Jay and Silent Bob, waiting for someone to come let us in to buy our comics, eventually leaving to go eat dinner. I called later to see if the shop was open after 6:00, but no answer. (Yes, "Alter Ego" is the first name in the alphabetical list in my phone, meaning I can call to inquire about the next issue of, say, Ex Machina, easier than I can call my parents or any hypothetical woman my age.) While I'm happy for Jason, the owner and proud father, I do wonder what kind of strange fate finds the culmination of human gestation on the same Wednesday Joss Whedon's "Astonishing X-men" comes out. I was even going to buy the new Brian K. Vaughn graphic novel- the sort of higher-end purchase a newly christened father of two would appreciate. Divinity forbid I should have to wait until 11:00 tomorrow morning to get my comics.

I watched a documentary last night called "The Commedians of Comedy," about the tour of the same name. I got it because I like Patton Oswalt's stand up, and I wanted to see who else was on the tour. During some road footage, he talks to the camera in a group interview about starting out, and he said that in order to get really good at something, you have to immerse yourself in it for two years. This is encouraging, as my academic career is now in extra innings.

The Black Keys have a new CD out. It's really good. Pick it up if you like their stuff.

"Overweight people now outnumber the undernourished." Link
Should I be nervous?

Last night, under the fog of a head cold and in lieu of doing anything constructive, I watched the movie Brick. I haven't been this enthusiastic about a movie since Primer. It's a film noir set in a California high school, but it really isn't a teen movie. The dialogue is all based on the prose style of Dashiell Hammett, so the lines are all in short clipped sentences. It's tough to describe, but I'll probably buy this one, so hit me up some night if you're bored and want to see it.

I'm really out of it after taking some medicine last night. It's a good thing I don't drive to school.

Since I can't ever actually take a vacation from the warm glow of a computer, I've spent my holiday break searching for music videos. These are my favorites:

Hurra Torpedo- Total Eclipse of the Heart I hate this song like poison, but this version is one of the coolest/funniest performances I've seen online.

Smashing Pumpkins- Pug This is my favorite live performance video from the Pumpkins, and I've seen a lot of them. They did a similar version when I saw them at Purdue.

Motorhead- Ace of Spades Exactly how much rock is too much?

Yup, it's true.

I've been reading The Long Tail, a book about the new economy evident in the online marketplace. It takes a book to explain it if you aren't a digital storytelling student, but here's a good example: (link) The "long tail" comes from the sales graph (say, from iTMS) where online sales peak with the predictable popular hits, then drops off sharply with the less popular songs. The graph never quite hits zero, though, and those low sellers add up like mad after a while. Niche markets hold more sway than they used to. The aforelinked article shows this, where casual gamers make up an estimated %76 of total game sales. This figure is broken down further, but the vast majority of people aren't as committed to gaming as the people video games are marketed to. This is interesting to me, anyway.

It's new comic day today. I got some good ones, the standout being Doc Frankenstein, a comic written by the Wachowski brothers that hasn't come out in nearly a year.

The mass influx of denim-clad academic acolytes to this jerkwater burg signals the start of the Fall semester once again. I've seen a few people I know walking around, and I can't help but notice the looks I get suggesting that people had thought I graduated. Not yet, kids- I'll be leaching off the state until December. In the meantime, I have plenty of projects to keep my busy, many of which will be documented online.

The last couple of times I've been to Best Buy, I've noticed an alarming trend in the music section. The employees are getting agressive now. It used to be that they'd troll the aisles and make their presense known now and again, similar to sharks off the coast of Hawaii. For some reason, they're now in full-on South-African-great-white mode, aggressively pouncing on anything in or near their territory. The first time it happened, I was digging through the middle of the alphabet in the rock/pop section. A blueshirt came up to me and asked me if I needed help finding anything. I said no without looking up, thus upholding my end of the social contract to at least the minimal standard. He pressed the matter, asking me what I was looking for, and I said I didn't know. He then asked me what kind of music I'm into, as if the Metalica-fan circa '93 hair/beard combo wasn't at least a clue. I'm pretty good at blocking out people I don't want to deal with, but this one actually tripped my old "don't talk to strangers" reflex. I looked up at him, said "lots of kinds," and moved away from him.

The second incident in recent memory was a week ago. I was looking for the Metric album that got a good writeup in the New Yorker, when someone came up behind me and said "hey, how 'ya doing?" Students had been filtering back in all week, and I figured I would see somebody I knew in public at some point, so I stood up and turned around to see a complete (albeit cute and female) stranger standing there in a BSU shirt. It threw me off, as her nametag was partially concealed by her hair. The faux-familiarity seemed presumptuous, and I gave her a weird look, as I was genuinely thrown off by her manner. I walked out of the store a little mad about this. The guy at the independently-owned Villiage Green didn't bug me when I ultimately bought the CD I was looking for in the first place. I like owning physical media, but iTunes and Amazon don't take the piss out of me when I purchase online.

My first attempt at 3-D modeling in Second Life:


I had to fight it a bit because the shapes can only scale down so far, and the ability to make 2d shapes is conspicuously absent (a low poly-count is desirable, one would think), but I'm happy with the result so far. For those of you who haven't read Warren Ellis's early-career Transmetropolitan comic, the odd-shaped glasses are a prominent character feature of the protagonist. I'm not %100 happy with this yet, and I may just break down and pay the $.34 to upload a 2-D image of the glasses. Thus far, I'm really impressed with Second Life.

Oh, how I want a burrito now.

The new apartment is quite nice, though I'm not totally settled yet. I'm working more until the semester to finish a couple big things at work, so I'm usually tired when I get home and end up going to bed early in order to catch the first MITS bus I can in the morning. The bus isn't bad, and the human menagerie is entertaining enough. I'm lucky to be on a line that stops right by the building I work in.

I opened the door the other night to find a huge spider web across the top left corner, complete with a large spider. The little bugger had spun the entire thing in the span of a few hours since I had last opened the door. I cleared it away, but the web was back the next morning for me to walk through. This was a formidable spider, with exponentially more legs than me, so I waited until it turned around (thus exposing the belly) and then clobbered it.

One more thing- I tried out Second Life to see what the character creation options were like. Here's my avatar after some rudimentary tweaking:

I think I'm happy with it. Now I just have to make some clothing textures.

This is intentional, don't worry:
Read that last line carefully: why would the IRS need a copyright? I found this spam in the BSU question/comment e-mail account that I've been working in. I don't normally read spam, but this one caught my eye because it was funny. Also note the processing time of 6-9 days. I don't think the IRS can change a coffee filter that fast.

Like the Flannery O'Connor story I read and forgot in undergrad, I am currently a displaced person. See description: that's me, but not in Africa. My landlord needed me to get out when my lease expired right as my employment status solidified for next semester, so I've been scrambling around with the help of several friends and family to move out and find somewhere to live. My next apartment won't be available until August 5th, so I'm currently crashing at "Gerry's Pad," so named by the red LED persistence-of-vision clock that flashes at me from my vantage point on the fold-out sofa. We ate at MCL last night "for the experience." Also for the blue jello, if I'm honest. The manager in the buffet line complimented my grey Fender shirt, which was nice, as I imagine the employees get sick of the aggressively quaint decorum. It makes me wonder what "quaint" and "kitsch" will look like when I'm old. Will we have pictures from the good old days of two-dimensional Doom sprites and the Google logo from before Google bought the Catholic church in 2016? Instead of depression-era Coca-Cola ads on the wall, will we have current recession-era ads? It's probably not too far off. After dinner, Gerry and I compulsively stopped in Hot Topic to look at shirts for bands we've never heard of. I ought to write down a few names and ask the Wundergrad if he knows them, but that would require me to care about bands formed after 1997. Then we went to the bookstore and bought books, proving that we do read after all. He got the Superman Returns shooting script and I got a book of essays about "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. Fun stuff.

I'm setting up a photoblog with a template that will allow for larger photos to be displayed. The template is simple, but I'm still having trouble with the formatting.