I probably shouldn’t be posting this, but Davo sent it to me when I was at work, and I nearly spat my drink across three quarters of the office. God only knows the intention of the person who created it. God only knows if it’s supposed to be silly or hurtful… But when sent from poof to poof, it’s like being in on the funniest joke ever…
So I was reading a post at Meg’s site called You – yes you – at the back: you may not talk in class. Best post title ever. Anyway… That’s not the point. I had a comment to make about it, so I went and started to write it, and then next thing you know it’s about a year and a half long and still incomplete. So like a fairly large seedling, I decided to transplant it to my site, intially for the normal part of the site, but then – you know what – it got even larger, so now it’s stuffed like an embarrassing piece of furniture in the attic of my site:
Who’s afraid of community participation?
The most interesting aspect about discussing “UK weblogging culture” is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a “community” at all. Perhaps more fascinating still are the assumptions of what participating in a community involves…
Taken by young Jamie Cronin, this screen-cap from earlier today will forever preserve the day when the train from London-South Wales was delayed by a large inflatable hamburger on the line…
This is going to get old quite quickly I think. Not the cartoons themselves, but the fact that I’m planning to link to the new one each day for as long as they’re about weblogs and weblogging: Doonesbury Oct 22 2002.
So what does it mean when weblogs get into Doonesbury? Are we still radical (if we ever were)? Are we established now? Must the world bow down and worship those (me) who have been weblogging for a very very long time? Is Oprah next? As Murray Lachlan Young once said about fame – “Who’s my guru? Where’s my hamster?”
You don’t get to see a lot of sky when you live in a city like London. For the vast proportion of the time the sky is an adjunct to your life. It’s outside your frame of reference. It’s barely relevant in fact. It’s the thing above the buildings, but only because there’s got to be something above the buildings. For the vast proportion of the time you’re surrounded by walls.
I feel different when I’m in the country now. There’s more sky there, and it tends to take centre-stage. I’ve come to love the sky since I’ve lived in London – because I miss it, I suppose. Sometimes you catch glimpses of it – the sun sets down Oxford Street when you’re standing near Holborn, and the walls become a frame for the sky for a moment. I feel like I’m straining my neck. In the country, the sky pushes down on the earth. It keeps everything in perspective. How can things seem important when there’s streams of colour in every direction as far as the eye can see? And the clouds hang in strips, or build like islands. And the sun ruptures through it all.
One of the most transformative experiences of my life was to do with skies. I was driving towards Bristol from London and it was raining everywhere. It was just before sunset, but it seemed like the night because the clouds were so thick. The air was more water than air and it was very difficult to see anything. And then for a few moments the sun came below the level of the cloud, and the sun was pink and red, and literally everything turned pink. The clouds lit up pink from below in all directions, the road was wet and reflected pink upwards. Every particle of water in the air caught the light and glinted and flashed. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
When I went to Los Angeles to see Kerry and Sean, we went to the pier. And we saw Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey. And there was a man on the pier with a bubble-blowing machine. And when the sun set over Malibu, I think I nearly cried because it was so beautiful. And I think Sean and Kerry thought I was a bit soft, or a bit insane.
There are times in the city when the buildings seem to high, they seem to block out the sun too much. They get in the way. Then the things that happen around us lose their perspective. They grow out of proportion. They’re huge. Their shadows are huge and cold. And then the relationships that have frayed and fallen apart seem spectre-like, inhuman. And the future seems formless yet empty – like it’s on a reel or tape loop, like it’s the skipping sound of a CD gone wrong. And then you take comfort in your friends, such as they are (or great as they are), and wait for something new to happen.
I saw Gideon and Nick today. We shopped for coats. I talked to Matt Webb over AIM, and met up with Kelly to celebrate her birthday. I met four new people today. Two were women, two were gay. I spoke to Danny on the phone, and tomorrow we’re going to see XXX. And I e-mailed my other Nick to see if he wanted to join us. And then there was the text message conversation with someone I’ve only recently been back in contact with. I’ve got a presentation to prepare and a sitting-room full of cold curry and empty drink cans. And a younger brother who means more to me than anything else in the world.
Yesterday I was talking about a Buffy-universe immersive online game – whether it could hope to make any money and whether or not it could hope to be successful or interesting. Since then, the debate’s really taken hold – particularly on the sites of Dan Hon and his brother Adrian – both of whom were involved to varying degrees with the cloudmakers that was responsible in large part for the community that grew up around the AI game. The sheer scale and intelligence of their responses is quite beyond my ability to summarise, so instead I thought I’d link through to the individual posts in as-close-to-chronological order as I could manage, which brief thoughts as and when they occurred to me:
I can’t emphasize enough how interesting Dan’s first post above is, or how insightful it is. Read immediately. Useful stuff…
A couple of days ago I posted about Willow mentioning Google on Buffy, and how cool that was. Exact exchange was, I believe, “Have you tried googling her?”, followed by Xander’s shocked, “Willow, she’s only seventeen!”
Ahem. Maybe you had to be there… Anyway – in the course of the episode, when in fact they google the girl in question, they stumble upon her site, where they find what can only be described as some bloody awful poetry. The site was visible on screen for a few moments. And here’s the extraordinary bit – it actually exists and is online: Cassie Newton’s Poetry and Paintings. There’s a thread on Metafilter all about it as well…
I had a conversation with a friend a short while ago about how similar this was (in some ways) to the AI game concept that Spielberg and Dreamworks dreamt up. Dan (the friend) and I, discussed whether or not the Buffy universe would be a suitable place for a game of the same size and scale as the AI one. Was it rich enough? Was it varied enough? Does it have enough scale, shape or granularity? And the answers, as Dan says, are clearly yes.
The question then is where or when you could launch such a thing – what potential benefits it could accrue for Joss Whedon and/or 20th Century Fox. The most obvious use for such a game would be as a parallel story structure to any potential Buffy-related movie, or as a long-teaser campaign for a Buffy-universe TV series. But I wonder – would there by any way in which an online Buffy game could emerge that paid for itself? Or are these kinds of games destined to be classy, intelligent and engaging promotional materials alone?
PS. Should Mr Whedon and the Buffy creators be interested in such a venture, I know exactly which people should be developing it – and one of those people should be me. My e-mail address (on the off-chance), remains tom%40plasticbag.org.
Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler ñ for let us assume that that is your name ñ you are accused of purloining in excess of 40,000 hotel coat hangers.
Chrysler: I am.
Counsel: Can you explain how this came about?
Chrysler: Yes. I had 40,000 coats which I needed to hang up.
Counsel: Is that true?
Chrysler: No.
One of my esteemed occasional-hosts in Los Angeles, Sean Nadeau, has finally assembled a site for all the astonishing flash animations he’s done for all kinds of weird people, including The Flaming Lips. Best thing he’s ever done? Tom does the Sound of Music.
