Posted on Aug 17th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
I know I said I wouldn’t write for a while, but come on…give me a break. I’ve been blogging consistently since January 2006 (not just here—other places). It’s like a muscle reflex at this point! I’ll only be writing a few times a month, but that’s better than nothing!
I was probably late in hearing about the viral video “David After Dentist.” Or maybe not. I don’t really have a sense of “pop culture” anymore. I’ve watched television once in the past four months, and I’ve developed a heightened aversion to the daily news flow. I do know that this has already been on “Tosh.O,” and I think that says something. There’s also the fact that it had 3 million views within the first few days of being online.
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Posted in: creativity, video
| Tagged: david after dentist · viral videos
Posted on Jul 13th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
After two years of somewhat consistent posts on this blog, I regret to inform that I will be taking a sabbatical. It could last anywhere from two to six months, or maybe longer.
I suddenly find myself wrapped up in a project that could very well become a book. I can’t say too much about it yet, but it’s an exploration the spot where I think we’re stuck as a civilization. The basic idea came to me on July 2, and since then I’ve been working like a mad man, researching and taking notes.
It’s exciting, to say the least! I never thought I would get to this point. Apparently self-publishing the collection of early works, Seeking the Upward Spiral, helped me move to the next level. It must have provided adequate closure to a very dark four-year period in my life.
So now, onward and upward! You may see an occasional post from me, if I have some news to share. And who knows, maybe I’ll post updates on my progress. In the interim, please keep an eye on Supraterranean. We really need submissions! Also, did you see the new Thumpme blog? If not, have a lookie!
Posted in: books, creativity, nonfiction, self-publishing
| Tagged: books · sabbatical · self-publishing
Posted on Jun 26th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
About a month ago I was preparing a streaming video player for an event at work. During downtime, the player streams old content from Michigan Television (public TV at U of M that has now been closed). In a pleasant coincidence, I happened to see an interview with Thylias Moss, an English professor at U-M who teaches a class on “Limited Fork Theory” in the School of Art and Design.
I figure you’re asking, “But what’s ‘Limited Fork Theory’?” It starts as a class about digital composition, but then goes way past the limits of traditional college education. As the course synopsis explains,
The approach is thematic rather than monolithic allowing students to draw information from any and all areas of their experience toward investigations of their own devising within a thematic context, this semester: framing systems. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting language systems: any/all visual, sonic, olfactory, tactile systems/subsystems on any/all scales for some duration of time.
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Posted in: art, books, creativity, education, multimedia, poetry, technology, video, writing
| Tagged: aldous huxley · heaven and hell · limited fork theory · the doors of perception · thylias moss
Posted on Jun 15th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.
In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.
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Posted in: journalism, law, news, politics, publishing, technology
| Tagged: bradley manning · julian assange · the new yorker · wikileaks · wired.com
Posted on Jun 9th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
On May 28, WBUR’s program “Here and Now” aired a segment about Wagner’s opera “The Ring” and its influence on comic books. (I’d embed it here, but they don’t let you download the MP3. You can listen at the link. Just scroll down the page when you get there.) Apparently many characters from graphic novels of the 20th century were shaped by Wagner’s four-part work.
This seemed relevant to me for a variety of reasons. I’m currently obsessed with Wonder Showzen, a heady spoof of Sesame Street that came from the Brooklyn group PFFR before they made Xavier: Renegade Angel. In one episode of Wonder Showzen, a child journalist goes around asking people, “What’s a hero?” The goal was to point out that we may be tricked (by movies, news and other media) into thinking that Superman or Iron Man or 9/11 firefighters are going to “save us.”
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Posted in: art, culture, music, nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, social networking, technology
| Tagged: hero myth · prometheus rising · robert anton wilson · the ring · wagner
Posted on Jun 4th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
The most interesting news I’ve heard lately on the topic of custom publishing came last month from Mashable.com. As Jolie O’Dell reports, you can now create and print a custom book using content from Wikipedia. Just click “Create a book” in Wikipedia’s left sidebar (under “print/export”), and then click “Start book creator.”
The video below explains the whole process, but it’s actually really simple. And I learned a lot about navigating Wikipedia that I didn’t know before. Once you’ve started adding pages to your book, there’s even a suggestion engine that recommends more relevant content for your project. Books are printed by PediaPress and the cost is based on number of pages. In the example, the book of 212 pages will cost $12.48, and they’ll ship in the U.S. for about $3. Not bad!
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Posted in: books, creative commons license, nonfiction, reference, technology
| Tagged: creative commons · custom books · e-books · e-readers · wikipedia
Posted on Jun 1st, 2010
by Nick Meador |
Before I moved out of Michigan, I tried to connect with other Evolvers (that is, members of the site Evolver.net) in my area. I contacted Alan Scheurman, who leads the Evolver Detroit spore. He had listed EcoZoic Detroit as the spore’s website. The About page at that site is brief:
We are a locally focused initiative, facilitated by EcoZoic L3C, working to catalyze paths towards community empowerment, sustainability, and resilience in the city of Detroit. We are building and expanding mutually enhancing relationships among the community of life.
“Our own special role, which we will hand on to our children, is that of managing the arduous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic Era, the period when humans will be present to the planet as participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.” -Thomas Berry
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Posted in: books, philosophy, religion, science
| Tagged: ecozoic · evolver.net · michael down · thank god for evolution
Posted on May 27th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
Icky poo poo wires make me feel dirty in my digital crotch
It’s been a long, strange month since I last posted here, and now I have 37 drafts to catch up with. If you haven’t heard, I’m now a resident of the Republic of Saint Kitts and Nevis, located in the Eastern Caribbean. My girlfriend is attending vet school at Ross University, which means we’ll likely be living on St Kitts until August 2012. I spent two or three weeks in a mad rush preparing for the move, and the last two weeks adjusting to life in a different (less “developed”) country.
I probably won’t be able to post very often at first. We have really poor Internet connectivity at our apartment (it’s out half the time, and when it’s on the speed is usually around 0.3 MB/s), so it not only takes longer to post but it’s also risky business (since WordPress doesn’t auto-save well when Internet is slow. Just after typing this sentence, my Internet went out — and I’m at the Ross campus!). And also, I’m still in the “struggle through each day” phase of starting a new life.
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Posted in: culture, publishing, technology
| Tagged: apple · apps · internet · ipad · iphone · new york times · open web · sunday magazine
Posted on Apr 21st, 2010
by Nick Meador |
Back in February when Kaliptus was planning the Tryptophantasia event, his friend Salma posted an interview with him on the site Evolver.net, a new social network with the slogan “It’s our world to change.” Naturally, I signed up for the site right away (here’s my profile).
I quickly learned that Evolver is connected with an online magazine called Reality Sandwich. Now the team behind the two websites are working on starting up the Evolver Social Movement, which is essentially their attempt to make the ventures financially sustainable (their primary investors bailed). Membership does require a monthly payment, but you get to choose the dollar amount (they’re asking for $10 per month, but it’s wide open).
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Posted in: publishing, social networking, writing
| Tagged: consciousness · daniel pinchbeck · evolver · kaliptus · reality sandwich · social networking · tryptophanatic netvision · tryptophantasia
Posted on Apr 18th, 2010
by Nick Meador |
Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.
In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.
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Posted in: books, journalism, law, politics, social media, television
| Tagged: citizen · distribution · journalism · media · reporting · wikileaks
