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 realistic, 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 “bataranged” 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 an 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 the 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 the fact 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

via Nerdy Girl Love

Friends and Music

Someone posted Sumerian Axe’s record By This Axe I Rule for download.

I know I keep posting about Grill ‘Em All but the dudes got interviewed by Tony from Municipal Waste and it’s way better than any of the other interviews they’ve done.

Spencer Owen has a mind for music that I will always envy; here’s his list of the top 45 records from 2000-2009. I’ve also been listening to him play “Letter Dance” and you probably should too.

As you may know, Carmichael Gallery is my favorite gallery in L.A. and they’re moving. For their last show in the La Brea space they’re showing the works of Mark Jenkins and Aakash Nihalani

Grant Purdum is one of my (very) understanding editors at TMT and does work for a host of other music publications which allows him to do some pretty cool stuff. For instance, he gets to participate in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop poll.

Assorted Good Feeling Makers

Nerdy Girl Love

Look At This Frakking Geekster It’s like that other blog except actually good.

Nic Cage as Everyone Exactly what it sounds like.

While I wait for new Venture Bros. I’ve been reading Todd Alcott’s analyses of episodes past.

Hanging around after the lunch rush was dying down I caught a glimpse of how powerful Twitter can be and was really struck for maybe the second time at the relevance of the emerging real time web everyone’s been talking about. (The first being meeting people because we tweeted about being in the same place.) I don’t know how big food trucks are in other cities but right now in L.A. they’ve become quite en vogue and their owner’s have been pretty good at leveraging technology in some ways to reverse the food truck/customer relationship. Instead of trying to predict where hungry people will be and finding them, food trucks are making it easy for their customers to seek them out and there is a community of food truck hunters that have emerged. It would be silly to totally do away with concern for location and I’m sure all of these vendors are using a sort of hybrid strategy, maybe the best example being a food truck food court in Santa Monica — Or Grill Em All setting up shop outside of The Cha Cha in Silverlake (For the simple and awesome reason that that’s where they go hang out at night anyway.) This in and of itself isn’t any real news, businesses have been using the internet to bridge the gap between themselves and their customers for a long time now. But the speed of feedback, and the rate at which it’s received and responded too is something new.

While I was standing there the head chef, Ryan, had is phone out and was reading all the mentions for @Grillemalltruck. The nature of this kind of business and Twitter users’ enthusiasm for food makes this pretty stunning. People who were literally feet away were taking a bite or two of their burgers and taking out their phone’s to chime in, mentioning everything from the burgers to the music to the bullhorn Matt kids around on. The ramifications of this type of response may not be as big as we’d like to believe; lightning fast data always sounds nice but more often than not outstrips the pace of other aspects in an operation. For example, the speed at which data like the most popular burgers comes in isn’t really relevant because that data isn’t relevant until it comes time to order more supplies; but, since the boys could have their phones hanging up in the truck, anything about quality or preference can be immediately addressed. Plus, I’m sure it’s nice to read that people are liking your food while you’re making it too.

It seems like this usefulness should be obvious (and old hat) but I’m not sure that it is. I’ve been to a few events now that followed and/or displayed their own hashtag feed but I’ve yet to see them used effectively. Let’s take the simplest type of event which would just be a speaker. The display is always behind them and if it weren’t you wouldn’t want them reading it during their presentation anyways. Useful activity generally dies during the presentation because, on the whole, people are paying attention. In my experiences, what you end up getting are a bunch of people on their phones announcing “I’m at ‘cool web thingy’ with __,” or, “I’m leaving for ‘cool web thingy’ now,” followed by little recaps or appreciative tweets afterward. Perhaps this is different at conferences when there are multiple presentations occurring simultaneously or during staggered time slots and could be used effectively in different rooms to give a picture of what’s going on where. I couldn’t say because I really have no business attending such things.

Seeing Twitter and thinking about all the big things you can do with it in the abstract is exciting but I’m really happier every time I see someone using it for something on the small scale. I think we’ll find the biggest and most significant changes it makes by adding up all the little things people do with it. I think we can look at these food trucks and see just how great Twitter is by how natural and unforced the shift feels.

For your enjoyment: @FoodTruckLA’s food truck list.

I don't think Marduk had anything to do with music but he's the type of dude Doc would know.

To the woman with the iPhone at the Mew concert at the Mezzanine in San Francisco on Sunday, December 13th:

I try to be fair so I will start by admitting that part of this is my fault. I made the mistake of poking fun at Doc when he tried to improve his vantage point by telling him that I come to concerts to listen with my ears. Either you heard me say this and took me at my word (perhaps you are Canadian?) or Doc is really good friends with some deity and they conspired to teach me a lesson. Perhaps it was a combination of the two and your natural impulses were simply encouraged by the “Solar Calf.” Divine impetus notwithstanding, you have managed to take what should be an awesome and powerful spectacle and turned it into nothing more than an incredibly expensive viewing of a Youtube video.

I hope your friends say “Oh, I understand exactly what they show must have been like.” Tack on “for those immediately behind you” and they’d be right. Actually, that’s not completely true. There were plenty of occasions where my view consisted solely of your arms because you turned sideways to take pictures of the projector screens. During the time you spent waffling on the decision to photograph the left or the right screen you could have actually been enjoying the show.

I don’t want this to become personal. I hate you in the aggregate. I hate all cell phone/point and shoot camera people at shows. (At least SLR people tend to care enough to get in the front row. And I find that the possibility of their pictures turning out ok makes their behavior seem less boorish.) You are all the woman with the iPhone to me. But you specifically, woman with the iPhone, outdid yourself last night, as did your friend. At first I thought you were alone. Who else would have nothing better to do than take pictures of screens and specks of musicians? Not once in the first forty minutes of the set did you seem to motion to another human being or share a moment, so engrossed you were in your archiving and memory banking. It became clear though that you did had a companion once she started “shhhing” the couple behind her for talking. I was standing next to them and could barely hear them. You know, over all the music and everything.

I have been lamenting the trend in live reviews involving the skewering and blaming of crowds* and I still think it should be next to impossible for a crowd to ruin a show just based on simple unresponsiveness and especially on scene/demographic (aka hipster presence) but in this case one individual, you, made my experience less pleasant than it otherwise would have been.
*Exhibit A
*Exhibit B

I just don’t understand. You were obviously a fan. You knew the words. You repeatedly said how awesome they were. Why wouldn’t you want to see and experience it for yourself instead of fumbling with your phone. Help me understand, ladies with the iPhones. What could you possibly get from this?

I’ve told people I was going to start looking into cyclocross. If you can’t laugh at yourself you shouldn’t have internet access. (video via BSNYC)

Kevin Marks gave a really interesting talk about the social theory and social media. If you have any interest in language you should check it out too because he pulls out some new terms to help describe what’s happening. New words are always fun.

Conversationalist is the next step for Twitter lists. The list updates itself daily to reflect who you’re talking to and about, providing your followers with more context for your own tweets.

Pranav Mistry’s TED talk is indeed thrilling. It’s also an incredible testament to hard work and vision. Would the phrase “paper computer” get you to click?

“It’s like Twitter. Except we charge people to use it.” This post made the rounds on Twitter a few days ago and would have had me rolling on the floor if I hadn’t already been lying in bed. I don’t want to give anything away but I’ll tell you that it has pie charts. Hilarious pie charts.

Gimme That Christian Side Hug: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Oj0-splZw via @nick

My friends Matt and Ryan are opening up what I think promises to be the best food truck in L.A. the history of music. It’s called the Grill Em All truck and this is what their art looks like.
This is my burger of choice. I think it’s street name will be the Dee Snider. Described as “smoked cheddar, marinated anaheim chilies, butter beer braised onions.”

They’ve been talking about doing this for a while and I know they’ve worked really hard on it. Congratulations on living the dream, and may the Eater LA mention be the first of many.

I guess I should tell you what I’m talking about in case you don’t want to read what the infinitely more knowledgeable and tech savvy Paris Lemon/MG Siegler wrote about. (The problem with blogging is that it can leave you feeling redundant. Immediately after getting Twitter my full length post production took a nosedive. Suddenly I found myself wondering why I wasn’t just posting “Good X album is good.”) For those of you who are either easily satisfied or like to be economical with your open tabs, I’ll tell give you a little info on 140inabottle. The service allows anyone, even non Twitter account holders, to compose and send a tweet which will, according to Siegler’s post, bob along the interwebs for anywhere from one to ninety days before it washes up in someone’s Twitter feed. It’s a completely random and anonymous interaction since the message will be delivered by the 140inabottle account instead of the author’s. Siegler goes on to consider how people can easily game the system and target specific users by merely mentioning them in the text so that a message will effectively arrive at two users’ feet. He’s right of course, but that doesn’t really interest me. What does interest me is the question I posed at the beginning of this entry. What do you say to a complete stranger when you can tell them ANYTHING at all as long as it’s within 140 characters? 140inabottle is a pretty descriptive name but I feel like “Crippling Freedom” might be an even better fit. Do I want to advise, uplift, confide… The fact that I have no idea who it’s going to makes me wonder how general I should be. Maybe I should just send a lolcat. An unexpected lolcat would improve anyone’s day no matter what. You just won the lottery? Here’s a lolcat. Your idiot son crashed your car? Have a lolcat. See, it can’t not work.

I was curious what other people were doing with this and of the forty-three messages delivered so far I’d say the majority are predictably emo and self righteous with a little weird humor in there as well. There are really very few complimentary and uplifting messages in that stream so far. Frankly I find a lot of the behavior and logic surrounding 140inabottle to be impenetrable. For starters, the account has followers. Real human followers, I checked. How is that not pointless when the account only send @ replies?

Then there’s the confessional tweet genre. It just seems like there are better forums for it like grouphug.us or post secret where you could really get it out there and where the feeling of unburdening yourself would be better realized because there is a community who is interested instead of on individual who’s going to get sandbagged by the fact that you think you killed your twin sister when they check their Twitter over their morning coffee.

Then there’s the ultra impersonal “I’m affecting change. The revolution’s on it’s way brah”
I mean, I guess. Doesn’t that just kind of feel like something you’d brush off your shoulder without taking a second look at though?

The compliments and uplifting messages are certainly nice to see but, like I said, are in the minority and are pretty general.

And then there was this. I’m not even really sure how to categorize it. My gut tells me to file it under creepy but then I read it and think, “but it specifically says it’s not creepy.”
I just don’t know what to think of it except that these anonymous services always sound really cool to me until I try them and realize that we have nothing to say to each other. That’s a startling realization for someone who spends hours a day writing messages to people. In the end I don’t really believe that we have nothing to say to each other. I can’t. If the sheer volume of content posted on the web every minute isn’t enough proof, I have really satisfying (for me anyways) interactions with strangers and acquaintances every day both online and in person. We must ask ourselves, “what is it then that is lacking in systems like this?”

If anyone can remember that anonymous and random (in the true sense of the word) IM site that that high school student thought up and had go viral on him for a minute a while back, please put it in a comment. That was another one I thought was going to be really interesting and ended up being a dud.

**I don’t know why this didn’t get posted earlier. In four days it will be exactly one month old. In that month 140inabottle has made over 1,100 tweets. I am still not impressed with us anonymous twitterers.**

It took me a couple of days to go, “Wait, fifteen minute long wandering harp based compositions would have been better?”

Last night the realizations that I had failed to interact with another human outside of the magic box in front of me in the last three days, that I had live review deadlines rapidly approaching, and that my clocks were an hour fast and I was the recipient of a bonus hour to my evening all spurred me into pants and out my door towards the Rickshaw Stop.

I met some cool people and my night got progressively better with the quality of music, although I was under the distinct impression that one of my new acquaintance’s happiness declined in direct proportion to my own enjoyment. I’m not so vain as to think that this was my doing but I’m not so as insensitive to completely dismiss the possibility that I am the Dorian Gray of concert going. This post isn’t about the show though, it’s about the aftermath of the show. As it was winding down I began checking the time and asked if anyone knew what time the last train out of Civic Center was. I thought it was like 12:20 (turns out it was 12:21) but I wanted to catch the end of the set and, as I wasn’t sure that the train stopped at 12:20, I allowed myself to be convinced very easily that 12:20 was too early for a city’s train to stop running. I figured it wouldn’t really be a big deal if I missed my train anyways and that I should probably see what happened if I did at least once so I could gauge whether it would be worth it on future occasions. (I ran the risk during W00tstock in order to get my poster signed and after last night decided it will have been worth it if I ever get it framed.)

What happens when you miss your train is this, you go back upstairs and talk to the teller. He stamps your BART ticket and you ask him if about an all night bus your room mate told you about. He says that he doesn’t have that schedule, he’s not sure if there’s a transfer from Oakland to get to North Berkeley, and that it’ll take so long you might as well just take the train at four. All of that seems reasonable and you decide to look for an all night diner.

On my way to Happy Donuts I was still in pretty good spirits. I had an excuse to eat donuts and was actually LOLing at those Windows ads about not being denied. I stayed at Happy Donuts until three when I was going to be kicked out for dozing off and my time there was pretty uneventful. I heard two Russians talk about how hard it is to get wi-fi in the mother country, one man complain about a lack of bear claws, and a traveling salesman talk about jewelry with cashier. (He had a Rolex but he was afraid to wear it because he’d mess it up. They also talked about how you know it’s a good place when they have all the bulletproof doors and chambers because the stuff is definitely real.)

As in pretty much all aspects of life, things got far more interesting when I got off the internet and went outside. I’d made it about a block before a well to do looking guy in a Mercedes tried to pick me up on Market St. I briefly weighed my options but ultimately declined. I was already aware that I resemble a “man of the night” but what I didn’t fully understand about San Francisco is how absolutely impossible it is to relieve yourself in a legal fashion. Nobody here wants anyone using their bathroom, not even paying customers like me who may or may not be male prostitutes. In “The Childcatcher” (Lycanthropy, 2003) Patrick Wolf declares that we are living in the “age of constipation.” Now, either he was wrong, the age has passed, or he was trying to make one of those things that people use in poems; because what I saw was closer to the “age of defecation.” Everyone was letting fly with with their bodily functions left and right. I myself had to embark on two different stealth pee missions. The first of which was far stealthier than the second, emboldened as I was by my new peers’ disregard for privacy and my own fatigue. Seriously, the first time, as I channeled my inner Batman in the shadows next to a mural, a man cut through the parking lot banging two drumsticks together. He dropped one and it began to roll in my direction. Ninja that I am, I went unnoticed and set out behind him on my way back down the street. I progressed maybe a block before running into a woman taking a shit on the front of a cafe. Across the St. there was a man proudly standing on the raised stone platform in front of a fountain, urinating into it in a way not unlike how Hank Venture did in the ghost pirate ship episode. There was more but it was pretty much more of the same. Thankfully, the fountain marked my arrival at the all night Carl’s Jr. I was migrating to and I didn’t have to watch too many more people turn the world into their bathroom.

The Indian woman behind the counter was very stern and made it clear that you had to order something before you were allowed to sit. I took my time thinking it over and settled on a cup of coffee but can easily see how someone who had to go through this routine regularly might become over weight. While in line I heard one man plead, “I got a house, talk to me.” I saw a man choke another man for no reason I could figure out; although, when he released him, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of hard feelings. I saw a couple share a Carl’s Jr. breakfast over a bottle of white whine and I saw a woman knock over that bottle of wine. No one cried over it. A man played Spanish radio off of his phone and no one seemed to pay any notice. One man hunched over and finished off the very end of a joint he’d obviously been saving. Two men discussed whether I was homeless or a hipster. The point of contention seemed to be the cheap headphones around my neck. When they discovered that the headphones were attached to an iPod, the consensus quickly became “hipster.” God I need some new pants and a shower.

The only other things I can tell you about my night was that when you’re spending a few hours waiting for a train, Johnny Cash’s songs start to become even more interesting and sometimes when you’re trying your best to stay awake you turn off Bitte Orca and put on Love Gun. It’s been a long time since I walked around a city that tired, watching the street lights melt, but the soundtrack doesn’t really change all that much. You’re destined to play the songs you used to play, and for me that turned out to be The Honorary Title’s debut. It might have something to do with the fact that Bryan Sheffield was talking about their last show on Twitter this week.

“If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.”

Empire Game Brought to you by some of the minds behind Pure Pwnage this turn based strategy game is bar none the most engrossing and fulfilling browser game I’ve played. It doesn’t require any major time investment (you can even let your turns accumulate for three days until you start missing out on them) but you find yourself really thinking about it when you are playing. I’m in three different rounds right now, trying three different strategies, and despite the claims that the system favors building up industry and buying mercenary troops I’m finding it possible to thrive regardless of my empire’s focus. Really well done. It’s in open beta now.

We Feel Fine – I got to talking with @fascinated the other day and he turned me on to this project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar which collects and logs sentences from blogs containing the term “I feel” along with corollary data. “The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.” that “can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions…” It’s been going since 05 so it’s currently massive.

@shitmydadsays got a t.v. deal

Console Wars via my friend Ben. “Truly a poetic and forgotten piece of American history. Will the war ever end?”

Creativity Loves Blowing Constraints Out of the Water via @jpdef or, for those that don’t tweet

I recently recommended just getting out of your home for whatever purpose and by any means. Today I want to take it a step further and say “go for a walk.” All types of transportation have their own merits but there’s nothing quite like a walk. I make practically the same walk almost every day which comes in at 2.2 miles round trip. And while it is the same it is also entirely different. On my way home, not five minutes ago, I realized that the reason walks are great is the same reason multiplayer FPS and RTS is great, although on the surface it looks completely repetitive and exactly the same, it is always different and infinitely replayable. There is a framework of rules and limitations that people must work within and there are classic tropes and generally accepted standard moves and counters but you never know exactly what you’re going to come up against.

There has been intermittent construction on my “commute” for quite some time and today I came across several newly set patches of sidewalk. They were still that dark grey color of wet cement but all the cones and tape had been removed. Those first tentative steps where I wasn’t sure if I would be sinking in or walking across

Sometimes when I drive (or more often, am driven) on the freeway I’m start thinking of all the other cars as setting and if I consider the drivers the feel a lot more like NPCs than anything else and then all of a sudden a biker gang drives past and I’m like, “Oh, nice detail, life designer” because it’s like one of those details writers think makes something feel authentic even though you hardly ever run into them in real life and then I realize that those bikers are actually real and they just had to think about weather to weave right or left there and they represent an entire life of choices leading up to joining that bike “club” and being on that freeway at that instant and then I realize that every single person on that freeway is a real person making their own adjustments and representing another entire life of choices that might literally or figuratively collide with my own in the next five seconds or fifty years and am kind of terrified and kind of amazed.

I guess what I’m saying is life is pretty much the richest game out there and you should stop playing the sims and take a walk. And if you really like shopping for electronics or whatever go do it in an interactive setting.

We are currently caught up in my day so this is shifting to just shy of a real time blog. I just pissed blood which kind of goes along with everything I’ve been talking about. In my twenty three years of living I’ve never done that before and I find myself with several options, call my mom and ask for her expert opinion, be a man and do nothing, or try to mine it for some comedic value on twitter. Obviously I’ve chosen the latter for the simple reason that I’m not a man and my mother would recommend immediate action, which I don’t really feel like taking at the moment. As usual I will provide you with the tweetular proof.

For those who don’t follow @andrewwk here’s what I was referencing

** This, I just added** I like to think he saw it.