Dunlap Dabbles » social phenomena

Bike Snob NYC Unboxing

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 05:48:50 +0000

When I was a young boy I used to order “signed” baseballs out of magazines. I use dismissive quotation marks here because they were really just stamped on facsimiles of signatures. The balls came in cheap plastic display cases and even at what I remember to be around 15 dollars were probably vastly over priced. Much to my parents’ credit though, they would, from time to time, allow me order such a novelty item. Perhaps it was because of how I waited. If you have ever ordered any novelty mail order good then you know that there is a lot of waiting involved. My econ professor in college admitted to getting drunk and ordering some sort of sandwich maker at two in the morning and receiving it six months later without any clue as to why. Similarly, these baseballs were promised somewhere between six weeks and just before I you lost interest in baseball. After about a week I would start sitting outside in the front yard from when I got home until five. Truth be told, I enjoyed being in my front yard. But there’s something about a kid hanging out waiting for the mail man that just gets to parents.

Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysterious Bike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.

The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small. Perhaps that is because it was built for performance. I immediately decided to take some measurements.

Like succulent homarus americanus meat ripped right out of a claw

In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.

As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.

And one and a half eyes wide. I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine. It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI. I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.

This bodes well for a quick, snappy read. I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.

Of Job Interviews and Star Wars Toys

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:35:40 +0000

Today was a day like any other for a lot of people out “there.” It was, however, an unusual day for me. For one thing, instead of waking up at 7:55 and running outside to move my car in a state of undress, I arose at precisely 7:00 A.M. and avoided the long and water resistant arm of the law by a healthy margin. I actually avoided the citation twice because with so much time on my hands I decided to go put gas in my car so I could actually make it to my job interview and when I got back home I promptly parked it in the exact same spot I’d gotten up to vacate. Then I went about trying to convince these people I could look professional and not only that, but that I probably look professional all the time. As time wears on, the perceived gap between looking a lot like something and being that thing continues to shrink; I’m convinced that pretty soon instead of passing a fireman’s test you’ll just have to show up in your own gear.

To give you an idea of the last time I wore dress shoes, I didn’t recognize the box at first because it was full of shooting targets from when I went to summer camp. I assembled an outfit that I like to think projected, “I’m wearing this sweater because I value unrestricted limb motion” and not, “I don’t have a jacket and I wanted to cover up the fact that I don’t have a belt.” I have no idea what the cut on my forehead I inflicted upon myself while trying to shave said, but, thankfully, they didn’t seem to notice. I’d say there’s some room for improvement with my morning routine but all in all I can do this professional, be-seen-in-public thing.

I’m not going to say where this interview was because A. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be publicly associated with someone who can’t shave properly and B. I don’t want to increase the odds of them coming to know that I can’t shave properly. The fact that I even had an interview was out of the ordinary for me at this point but the interview itself was actually relatively standard in that, while being interviewed by another man of similar age, Star Wars became a topic of discussion early on. One of the things we talked about was the superior quality of the original versions of episodes IV-VI. Nothing ground breaking there. (I’m pretty sure there are people who have no idea who Greedo is that can tell you Greedo shooting first was a mistake.) As the discussion progressed I had a new insight into why I probably liked them better besides the obvious reasons that they were what I knew first and they were aesthetically consistent throughout.

I recently found the bulk of my Star Wars toys cached away in my brother’s home office and these were probably the finest children’s toys ever produced. The fact that you could tell that they were using models in the films didn’t make it less realitic, it made it more realistic because I actually had all of those space ships in my room! When I think of an X-Wing, I actually think of the behind the scenes footage of the Death Star run where they’re moving the fighters with wire. I don’t want to say that the props used weren’t detailed, because they were, but that’s never been the point with Star Wars fans. For every obsessive that goes out and buys an official piece of merchandise their are dozens more that make their own. Polish has never been the point. This is a fantasy franchise that is, perhaps more than any other, rooted in its fans’ ability to bring about physical manifestations and see it in reality. The more I think about it the more confused I am as to why merchandisers and film makers ignore this aspect of it’s success. I am not a toy collector or fanatic. I don’t buy any real collectibles at all. Not even those vinyl figurines people who like urban art seem to enjoy so much. But I’m pretty sure a common complaint (from children) is that these toys are poor representations of the films’ subjects. It’s probably a relatively alienating process to play with a toy from a more recent movie franchise. Not because the toys are bad, imagination is always going to be inherent in playing with a toy. It’s actually the best part. That aspect let’s you have the fun of putting Han and Chewie in Sherwood Forest, only to be “bat-a-ranged” by Batman. If anything, I’m saying the movies are getting too good.

I haven’t seen Avatar yet but from what I understand this movie is all about polish. It’s supposed to be immersive on a level we haven’t seen yet and apparently Cameron has set his sights on Lucas’ franchise in terms of producing a back story and universe to rival the one present in Star Wars’ literature, games, encyclopedias, and what-nots. But it’ll never happen; because, while Avatar might be more fleshed out with it’s scientifically accurate planet descriptions and it’s professionally created and documented languages, the film was made with the intention of being realistic to an unrealistic degree. It’s hard to say a movie that has brought in over ~~1.3~~ 1.9 billion dollars worldwide is a failure. Especially considering how close it is to eclipsing Episode IV’s revenues (adjusted for inflation.) A film as financially successful as Avatar will surely have an impact on the industry and will probably always have a certain type of pop culture cache as the first of it’s kind technologically. However, there is no way a fan can take a piece of a movie like Avatar home and, in my mind, that’s going to kill it.

Although they probably don’t see it this way, even Avatar’s most rabid fans are admitting that this is a problem.

The more I think about it, the more benefits I see to treating a film project like open source software, at least if you’re trying to foster a community surrounding the work. I think about a show like Pure Pwnage which has become wildly successful for a web series (and is making a switch television.) They have done an amazing job monetizing the form. Part of that is due to the fact that they have a relatively uniform audience with a shared, targetable, interest — gaming. Online advertising is really only part of the puzzle, merchandising has got to be at least three of the corner pieces here. In the beginning the characters wore distinctive (sometimes copyright infringing) shirts that were obviously home made. You can buy those shirts. You can wear your FPS Doug shirt and feel like you have a piece of the show. Even if Jeremy isn’t rubbing each shirt on his balls.

Pure Pwnage is also a show that has the spoof factor. It’s actually gotten pretty sophisticated now and has aspects that would be difficult to reproduce but when it started out they were literally walking around with keyboards and using a PSP with a chord hanging out of a pipe to “open” security gates. I’m not saying everything has to be that rudimentary, there are plenty of large scale productions out there that allow people to get the same sense. Indiana Jones had a huge budget and tons of action scenes but what do people love most about Raiders of the Lost Ark? They love a hat, a whip, a bag of sand, and a dude getting chased by a big rock.

And fans go out and make stuff like this.

The fact that this Lego boulder got busted on Mythbusters doesn’t matter, just like it doesn’t matter that I’ve never heard of a boulder booby trap in real life or that the motorcycle scene from The Last Crusade got busted. These films don’t have to be realistic, they just have to make you feel like a real part of something.

A quick search will yield some awesome non literal star wars interpretations…

yoda oragami

and they’re all more satisfying than this

Critical Mass: Sometimes One Is All It Takes

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:18:04 +0000

I was first introduced the concept of critical mass through the 100th monkey effect/phenomenon. For those of you who don’t know and are too lazy to click the link, the 100th monkey effect refers to a report that while monkeys were transmitting knowledge by normal means of education, there was a specific point (the 100th monkey to learn) at which the knowledge ceased to be conveyed normally and jumped to something resembling spontaneous learning that defied social and natural barriers. Critical mass as it is generally understood just describes the number of people required to do something before it is widely adopted which will in turn fuel even more widespread adoption of that action or behavior.

The 100th monkey effect seemed weird to me the first time I encountered it. You have to understand that it was the first thing I heard when I walked into an unlisted after school club called Charlotte’s Web that had no visible link to any subject. The faculty member proceeded to tell me that I was the last member they would accept because the club was now one away from achieving critical mass and they didn’t want it to get out of hand. In retrospect, my high school was pretty cool. After I had a chance to think about it, the 100th monkey effect seemed more reasonable than critical mass itself. After all, societies around the globe all seem to have designed similar origin myths independently of one another at around the same time. Tools too were developed in different societies independently. But critical mass… that always seemed like it should be one. The idea, of course, is that the early adopters are doing so on a basis of merit rather than simple emulation. Let’s look at the classic example of someone looking into the sky. A passerby might follow the onlooker’s line of sight while they continued to walk and, if there was something of interest, they would pause. Enough people standing around looking up though and a passerby would stop to scan the sky simply because there were so many already doing it.
The pedestrian assumes there is something up there, or that the behavior has merit, even if they can’t see it.

While critical mass is interesting and exciting in a kind of mass hysteria, lemmings off a cliff kind of way, I think the first couple of people are the most interesting part. That’s why I was so happy to see this video.

I guess you could say that the first few people started dancing because it’s fun and the others started dancing because critical mass was achieved. I’d rather argue that while not everything has a critical mass of one, dance parties do.

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