Meta Blog

Meta Is Better...

Ah, a Meta Blog. A blog post about the blog in which it exists. No content, about itself, breaking the ninth wall.

So lets get started.


Content: The content of my blog has been casual reflections on my Networked Media Production unit. It reflects on how excited I was by HTML and I stopped writing about it after our first assessment. I wonder why that could have been? Oh well, that’ll teach me to use dreamweaver. I’ve tried to make things interesting but I have generally failed. Which is fine by me because... well, I’ll get to that.

Audience: If the blogsphere is the world’s atmosphere then this little group of bloggers for this unit is a microclimate. Our audience is each other, if we have an audience at all. I know of only two non-unit-administrator-types who have ever read my blog; they are CFAR and ZombieStomper. And ZombieStomper actually sits next to me in class so she hardly counts. But that’s okay. A blog is something we don’t necessarily need an audience for. It’s purpose for me was to journal things in a way that had the potential to be read by anyone, but the chances of being read by next to no one. I didn’t expect anything else.

Connectivity: Now this is interesting. My blog was instantly connected to a few other blogs via the blogroll. (Which I titled “Fellow Inmates”) But beyond that I didn’t so much go out of my way to get connected to the Internet, rather I used it as a tool. I like to think that early on with my blog I used Hypertext to its fullest extent. I found that making normal words hyper could add a whole new layer of context and could make sentences funnier, deeper or a take them to another extreme of boring. I’ve tried hard to promote some of my favorite new-media work. I have frequently linked to the TV Tropes site, and also made reference to Hungry Beast and TGTW.

But Liquor Is Quicker!

Now to get some real reflecting done. This Unit started out as a very exciting eye opening experience and degenerated quickly into a chore and the feeling that my time was being wasted. While the lectures usually always have some excellent content that gives my imagination a nice friendly kick, the tutes have been consistently boring and more often than not they’ve been very unhelpful. I can’t bring myself to blame anyone but it certainly felt like this entire unit could have been done through moodle (which would make it an excellent correspondence course) The worst part is that it’s essential to my degree; which is almost as bad as needing to do a major in professional midwifery. The main thing about this unit that turned it into a chore was this stupid blog. When you don’t want to write something it’s hard to get yourself to write something. That’s not to say it’s hard to write a blog, but it is very hard to write a blog on demand. Without pay. (I recon if I was being paid to blog I could do it easy).

So I’ve got that out of my system. Here are my three “best” blog posts in blogological order:

Number 1:

Gleeful Brooding and the Positive Effects of Depressing Thoughts...

I've just gotten home from work. Well not just, I had a smoke with Tom from up stairs and I watched some Chester A Bum and now I'm typing. I wanted this blog to be funny all the time and slightly offensive all the time but I think that’s impossible because I myself am not funny and offensive all the time. At the moment I'm a bit melancholy. Long night at work doing shit for shit pay to come home and feel down will do that to you.

So I was rolling a cigarette, as I do. And I got that feeling I know many people get. Its when you're just depressed, your brain has run out of happy juice and if you can't put some of your own happy juice into it (using a drug of some sort or chocolate or a loved one) then its going to go back to its natural state of shitfest. And you'll be stuck with the best thoughts you'll ever get in your life.

But the actual thoughts when this wave firsts hits you is difficult to at first recognize and then also to describe. But I think I’ve cracked it. You lose context. Context of yourself. I was sitting there rolling my smoke and that's all I was. Some bastard who smelt like a Hungry Jack's bin rolling a smoke in an apartment he can't afford to live in at one o'clock in the morning. I felt like I had no past, no future and my present was just pathetic and pointless. But at the same time my straw Vulcan logic told me that it was a chemical thing and that I should do something about it because such thoughts can actually be dangerous. So I thought I’d write, which is the first best cure for such things because in a rush of self worth you put yourself back in context.

So this post is partly therapeutic.

But now I have some insight into media production, and it comes courtesy of Spike Milligan via my English teacher Mr. Unwin. Mr. Unwin once told me about a story Mr. Milligan had written, it was about this youth. Say he's nineteen. And he's walking up a street, and he stops. There's an old guy sitting there who asks him why he's stopped. The kid says "because I can't forward, I mean as the street gets further away both sides just get closer and closer and eventually they'll get to close together and I’ll be able to go no further."

Old guy says, "Don't be so bloody stupid," because kids are bloody stupid, "That's just perspective, you'll find as you keep going forward the streets will stay parallel, it because things that a further away seem smaller and so the gap between the sides of the street seems smaller."

The kid says all right and keeps walking. Eventually of course the sides of the street have in fact closed in and he can go no further. Angry and embittered he turns around and walks all the way back. The old man isn't there because he's died in the meantime.

I get that story now.

It’s all superficial. Everything. What's there is what is. Our ancestors would have us believe otherwise but its all bullshit. They believed in stupid things that were obviously wrong and obvious things that were stupidly wrong. The only truth is what we can see and hear and feel and all else is rubbish. If a woman looks beautiful, she is beautiful. Our bodies are all we are. No soul, no magic dust or whatever people think. Our brain sustains all our thoughts and memories and if you don't believe it your mind can be changed thought chemical and surgical stimulus. When your brain stops working you are gone. You go to the same place fire does when it is put out.

This is beautiful and perfect and makes sense. So be nice to your bodies, it’s all you've got and take this lesson away with you. What we see is so much more powerful then what we're told. What we're told can contradict what we see and we'll often believe it, but we ultimately shouldn't. In that same thread if you watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, keep searching until you can pull a rabbit out of a hat. Find out how it’s done. Kill the magic because magic is lies. If you have a website showing the magic trick, you're ripping people off unless you have a "how to" section that explains the trick away.

Which brings me to my very long-winded point. New Media is a combination of media available to anyone with an Internet connection. The most powerful medium is video, then a toss up between still pictures and audio and then text. A good website will have all three but showcase the Video. The video should be the heart of the website wherever possible. That will draw the surfers in and then if it’s good enough excite them to look at other stuff on the site. They will become interested enough to look at the pictures and listen to the audio, all the while the text will have been guiding them but only after exhausting the multi media will the likely settle on the written articles. That could be wrong, mind you, people could watch video and then go straight to articles (or comments and discussion of the video, that seems very likely) anyway that is how Spike Milligan and Mr. Unwin helped me understand some media stuff

Number 2:

The lecture today was like of you put if you put Denny Crane in a box freezer for a few years. Kind of hard but totally awesome. To give you some idea of how my brain was when it started I shall use some of my screenwriting skills.

HTML

Hey!! OMG I haven't seen you in ages!

DAVESAKE

Oh, hi HTML, how's it going?

HTML

I'm just having the totally best time of my life! Being the foundation of the World Wide Web is like one long acid trip!

DAVESAKE

Oh yeah sound great.

HTML

So you wanna get blind stinking drunk and spew all over That Guy With The Glasses?

DAVESAKE

Oh gee, hey HTML that sounds great except I'm totally swamped at the moment...

HTML

Swamped with what?

DAVESAKE

I... I... I... Oh! I have to clean my room. Big mess. Bad. Gotta clean it.

HTML

Whatever dude, my port is always open if you wanna ejaculate some of those creative juices.

DAVESAKE

Yeah okay see ya....

DAVESAKE(cont.)

(Mumbling under breath)

Loser.

So I was basically not at all interested and a little intimidated by the thought of HTML. And then Mike got the little black screen happening with all the little tags and words and codes and stuff and he opened it with safari and it was a webpage and then he changed the little codes and shit and then refreshed the safari page and it changed and I was totally like I could totally like do that it would be soeasyandonceigotthebasicsthepossibilitiesareliketotallyendlessandtheniwasliketotally SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Wooh.

Calm. Calm. Calm calm calm Calmcalmcalmcalmcalm!!!!!!! SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Okay. I'm good.

So yeah I am very impressed with the possibilities presented by learning HTML and I’m actually even starting to waver in my chosen career path... Curse you interesting lectures, you damn me again!!!!

There's a HTML section in blogger and I’m keen to give it a try. So my next post (unless something happens) will be done in HTML on blogger.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was my previous post in which I used spike Milligan’s story to explain that the superficial is all there is.

Well.

Don't I look clever now. WebPages are basically a middle finger to that line of thought (it still applies to real world stuff though) and my poor and faithful friend wysiwig died today halfway through the lecture at the cruel hands of Mr. Honey (my new favorite bond villain).

Well thanks for reading Nobody, you've been good company. I look forward to our next session together, and I think I’ll invite HTML over for a party, he sounds pretty keen.

Number 3:

The Tradeoff

Michael has spoken about a trade off that comes from this mass connectivity that exists in the world. The price of Metcalfe's law, so to speak. As an example he spoke about cutting out the middlemen, disintermediation. The newspapers lose money because they no longer are the place to go to sell your junk. We've got eBay now for that. But then the newspapers can't afford to employ journalists and we're deprived of quality journalism.

I very strongly disagree with this line of thought, and believe that the tradeoff occurs far away from the pros and cons of the death of old Media. For one this, Old Media is losing for a reason. There is next to nothing New Media can't do that Old Media can. Quality journalism comes from quality journalists, not from newspapers. If the newspapers won't employ them then the Internet will be their new best friend. Blogs, as has been pointed out in lectures, can be seen as journalism. Sell advertising space on your blog and if you're good enough you're getting paid again. If Twitter wants to make money, they should have people pay to subscribe to quality journalist news feeds, after all it’s not only about reporting the truth but reporting it the fastest. What we lose in the newspapers, the Internet gives back in abundance. And saves trees.

So where do I think the tradeoff happens? Well after today's (wait, time check... yesterday's) lecture I had a thought... Global citizens are fucking stupid.

This Networked Media Class might be able to guess Michael's weight using the power of averages, but big fucking deal. Crowds aren't wise. There is some lovely maths that means educated guesses are excellent things to group and draw graphs from and can help in lots of lovely ways. Key Word here; EDUCATED! In terms of chance, it doesn't work that way. That magician who claims to have used a group of people to predict the lottery numbers (he was on sunrise, so was the guy who proved he was a fraud. It was a simple technological trick using some camera magic, not crowd psychicness) So people in large groups are not smart, unless they are all educated a little on the subject at hand.

So here it is. The Tradeoff. Collective Intelligence gives us YouTube, wikipedia and other wonderful things that I adore and wish I could go back in time and invent.

And it gives us people who will buy tulips for ridiculous amounts of money. It gives us the collective intelligence mob mentality that will drive the price of stock to ridiculous lows just because one person has lots of shares. It robs us of real world material in many ways. The GFC GEC Sub prime mortgage whatever left a lot of people in a very bad situation. That poor Dutch schmuck who sold all his land for a fucking flower is another example. It makes the value of things wrong. Good and services should be simple, supply and demand should be simple. i.e. Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be valuable. Just because something is rare and useful, doesn't mean it should be valuable. Bu when something is rare, useful, and everybody wants one, it should be valuable.

Collective intelligence warps value to the point of idiocy. And gives such a pool of human thought that there is nothing we can't achieve.

It’s almost paradoxical, but I think it’s a fair tradeoff.

Project B Rationale

The Adventures of Gub the Penguin

I chose to do a Geo-Narrative for Project B. This was because I am a creative person and would much prefer to tell a story than to display information. I encountered a problem early in that I had recently lost my camera and so was unable to use my own images in the way that i had planned. I overcame this problem by using a variety of public domain and copyleft/ share and share alike images that I found on the internet, and photoshopping them heavily. It basically involved two sets of images; the characters (namely a variety of Emperor Penguins as Gub, John Howard as Tulio and Daniel Craig as Dick the Head).

I chose John Howard and Daniel Craig as the faces for my human characters because they are heavily photographed people and a lot of the images of them available are in the public domain.

For the story itself I wanted something funny and bizarre; the sort of thing Monty Python would do. And I felt it was important that I have several characters on several separate journeys that ran parallel to each other. In addition to this I wanted there to be a surprise at the end, so I introduced the John Howard character as a Master of Disguise. This allowed me to have some fun and introduce the “Where is Tuilo...” aspect. The humour therein lies, of course, in the fact that it is very obvious where Tulio is. This also allowed me to have the surprise ending with the final image of Gub being Tulio in disguise.

I had initially intended to use the lines in Google Maps to show every place the characters travelled, but this proved too difficult and I was running out of time. Not to mention that there are no commercial airlines that do flights to antarctica; or at least none that have a frequent flyer program. So I limited the use of the line tool to Gub’s return to antarctica, and I numbered the markers so that the narrative still had an easy to understand chronology.

The networked aspect of my project lies most heavily in the fact that the images used were posted on flickr and embedded on google maps. Two seperate websites combined to make something new. The project could not exist without either. In addition to this there are many links to various websites for additional information on the content of the websites. Some with genuine information, and some that were simply there for the humour factor.

(Randoms plus randoms plus randoms plus randoms)*n=pattern/beautiful.

(Randoms plus randoms plus randoms plus randoms)*n plus human thought=dumb!

Interpreting pasterns as anything other than beautiful can be very dangerous...

The Tradeoff

Michael has spoken about a trade off that comes from this mass connectivity that exists in the world. The price of Metcalfe's law, so to speak. As an example he spoke about cutting out the middlemen, disintermediation. The newspapers lose money because they no longer are the place to go to sell your junk. We've got ebay now for that. But then the newspapers can't afford to employ journalists and we're deprived of quality journalism.
I very strongly disagree with this line of thought, and believe that the tradeoff occurs far away from the pros and cons of the death of old Media. For one this, Old Media is losing for a reason. There is next to nothing New Media can't do that Old Media can. Quality journalism comes from quality journalists, not from newspapers. If the newspapers won't employ them then the internet will be their new best friend. Blogs, as has been pointed out in lectures, can be seen as a journalism. Sell advertising space on your blog and if you're good enough you're getting paid again. If Twitter wants to make money, they should have people pay to subscribe to quality journalist news feeds, after all its not only about reporting the truth but reporting it the fastest. What we lose in the newspapers, the Internet gives back in abundance. And saves trees.

So where do I think the tradeoff happens? Well after today's (wait, time check... yesterday's) lecture I had a thought... Global citizens are fucking stupid.
This Networked Media Class might be able to guess Michael's weight using the power of averages, but big fucking deal. Crowds aren't wise. There is some lovely maths that means educated guesses are excellent things to group and draw graphs from and can help in lots of lovely ways. Key Word here; EDUCATED! In terms of chance, it doesn't work that way. That magician who claims to have used a group of people to predict the lottery numbers (he was on sunrise, so was the guy who proved he was a fraud. It was a simple technological trick using some camera magic, not crowd psychicness) So people in large groups are not smart, unless they are all educated a little on the subject at hand.
So here is is. The Tradeoff. Collective Intelligence gives us YouTube, wikipedia and other wonderful things which i adore and wish i could go back in time and invent.
And it gives us people who will buy tulips for ridiculous amounts of money. It gives us the collective intelligence mob mentality that will drive the price of stock to ridiculous lows just because one person has lots of shares. It robs us of real world material in many ways. The GFC GEC Sub prime mortgage whatever left a lot of people in a very bad situation. That poor dutch schmuck who sold all his land for a fucking flower is another example. It makes the value of things wrong. Good and services should be simple, supply and demand should be simple. i.e Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be valuable. Just because something is rare and useful, doesn't mean it should be valuable. Bu when something is rare, useful, and everybody wants one, it should be valuable.


Collective intelligence warps value to the point of idiocy. And gives such a pool of human thought that there is nothing we can't achieve.

Its almost paradoxical, but i think its a fair tradeoff.

week 9 ends...

So. I'm back. Yay for me, and for anyone who reads my awesomeness. I'm actually severely pissed at NMP lately because I've lost my black folder that contains all my everything so far for uni. So I've been incredible stressed about that...

I think I lost it in our tute on wednesday, or the lecture. Either way I'm not happy Jan. But the tute was otherwise interesting, we had to do a high school style report on some major internet players but Pirate Guy thought we'd learn more or whatever if we did it on a company that was not very well known. EG: Instead of youtube, maybe hulu or something. Or askjeeves vs google. That sort of thing.

Speaking of google, everyone in this unit should really watch the Hungry Beast google video. I don't have much internet left so I wont be posting a link to it but if you've got internet (and you're reading this so i assume you do) then google "hungry beast google" or "the beast file google" and watch the video. It'll make you scared of google.

(also did you know that Google's company moto is "Dont be evil"? Fair enough but HAHAHAHA Irony....)

So enough outbursts and back to the blogging and crap.

Funnily enough I didn't get Google, i got some never before heard of thing called Reddit, which is similiar to delicious but a bit different. So we just did Delicious, although i did have fun with google trends for the first time so yay me.

I've got a plan actually of what I'm going to do with google trends, so stay tuned and wait for some conspiracy theory driven madness.

So that's my blog for now, see ya next time if the government doesn't use their satellite to turn my RFID chip into a microwave emitter and cooks me while i walk my dog that i don't have...

Project A Rationale

My project was a satirical exhibition of photographs of spiders in the wikipedia commons. Its a website that can be found at www.arsekickx8.freewebpages.com. I didn't use any design software (ie: dreamweaver) and as such i wrote the whole thing from the ground up. And it sort of looks like it. I embedded items from flickr to create the banner and the background and just used HTML and CSS for the rest.

I chose to exhibit photographs of spiders because i truly believe that they are beautiful and have been taking photos of them for years now. I've gotten quite good, but the majority of spider photos in the wikipedia commons are of a considerable higher quality, and most are copyleft. The most one has to do to use one of the photos is contribute it to the wikipedia user or the photographer's actual name.

Similar websites include this site and this one. One thing that bugged me about these websites is that they are all so serious. Conveying information both true and useful, their photographs are amazing but their text is dull. So I thought a satire would be fun for both myself and visitors to the site.

I followed some fairly standard design patterns, using a banner at the top, a hyperlinked table of contents at the bottom (to encourage people to scroll over the entirety of the page before moving on). I also had links to some of the wikipedia users that i referenced and a link to my blog. I tried to find photos that were extremely big because it annoys me when I'm looking at thumbnail pictures and i find one thats interesting and i have to open a new tab or move on from where I'm at in order to see the full sized version of the photo, so the pictures don't link, they're there in their entirety already.

I divided the spiders into their native continent because i know when I'm looking for spiders the first two things i want to know are "is it venomous?" and "where is it from?" But I chose to divide them by continent because i wanted more than two sub heading "deadly/not deadly" and I thought the continent option provided me with the opportunity to make jokes about the continents.

I also included a twitter feed that hopefully gauges the general public's view of spiders. This adds a sort of live and happening feel to the site and for some reason twitter users only tweet about spiders in a funny and terrified way so it adds to the humour of the site.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project because it taught me a wonderful new skill (HTML) and how to use it, and I enjoyed writing the jokes about the individual pictures and i think the pictures themselves are stunning. I hope my work stands up against others in my group but I wont be too fusses if it doesn't look too stunning because it follows the basic layout of a lot of the websites i found that show off spiders.

Hmmm...?

This post is going to be a sort of catch up post, because i didn't do one last week and i really want to talk about this week's lecture so I'll do another one shortly about that. So my assignment... I'm doing a website type thing about pictures of spiders, its at www.arsekickx8.freewebpages.org if you're interested. I thought i was doing a pretty good job too. Michael said he didn't want us to use dreamweaver because it doesn't show that we've learnt about what he's teaching. So I didn't. I made the background thing myself in paint for mac and posted it flickr and linked to it with the CSS in such a way that it repeats over and over again. I think it looks great and i was very proud of it until my tute yesterday when pirate guy said "Well you've mastered HTML, now if you can just make it look good."

OUCH!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks a lot, pirate guy.

He said it looks liek the internet used to look ten years ago. So I looked around to see what everyone else was doing. Dreamweaver. I swear to god if i get marked down because everyone elses is flashy and special then I'm going to be very upset. I didn't even use a template or anything for my site, i just thought about what a site looked like and I used what i knew to make it look like a website. Sigh...