Happy day after Pi day!

...

IT IS DONE.

for now.
I'll keep uploading things, but am ready to unveil it to the world!

Drumroll please...

MY WEBSITE (/portfolio)!

Go ahead: click it.

Trololo

If this song doesn't raise your spirits, nothing will.
Also, I love the psychedelic entry scene, this video is just full of surprises!

One day our cerebral cortex will be USB compatible.

Found this in my unpublished archives: May 2008. Hooray digging through the past!

My roommate wrote an insightful post about the YouTube Generation on her blog that really got me thinking (in other words, blogging). She pointed out how lost we would be without our precious internet not only because it's entertaining (can I just say that RSS feeds are comp-nerd crack? Because they are.) but also because it gives us immediate access to information beyond our wildest dreams. The world is quite literally at our fingertips. It's easy to forget this as we type our cute little emails, browse our cute little webcomics, or stalk our cute little e-friends, but when you step back and think about it, it's mind-boggling. It's no wonder the older generations are scared of technology... If I didn't know better, I'd just as well assume this series of tubes is witchcraft.

Sometimes I think that being exposed to all of this information is evolutionarily counter-productive. Our brains begin to rely completely on what the computer provides. In the novel Shampoo Planet, when one character forgets where a country in Africa is located, the main character replies:

“Fairs fair. I mean if we are supposed to learn all the new information people are inventing, we have to throw old information out to make way for the new stuff. I guess history and geography are what’s being thrown away. What is geography to anyone who speaks to people all over the planet every day all at once on their computer nets and modems?”

He has a good point though, when we have Wikipedia, CNN.com, facebook to tell us everything that’s going on, (or basically anything that’s EVER HAPPENED) we don’t need it in our heads anymore. Who really NEEDS to know when the Civil War was or who invented the helicopter (even though I OWN one). Did I mention I’m thinking of getting metal legs?

Then again, that's exactly what the internet would want me to say...

…c0mput3rs ar3 t4k1ng 0v3r 0ur m1nds!

Moral of the story: We rely a lot on computers. It's kinda neat. It's also kinda scary. Now go read a Douglas Coupland novel and watch Grandma's Boy.

Endnote: The idea for this post came from my roommate's blog , and my comment on it. I figured writing up an entirely new post would be a) stealing her intellectual property and II) harder than Ctrl+P. In other words, I'm thoughtful but lazy.

Work, Fear, & Waking up that voice in my head.

While my friends went off on an exotic cruise bouncing along the pan-american coastline, I decided to spend this week doing work. Catching up on homework, going to a workshop, applying for post-grad work, and using force to move things a certain distance (multiply them, btiches! it counts!) I'm doing this, not because I am the most responsible of my friends, but because I am driven by the most powerful emotion in the whole wide world: fear. Fear that I won't find a job, fear that I've tinkered with my brain chemicals beyond repair, fear that if I don't learn marketable skills NOW I'll be useless once released to the real world, and the ever-present haunting fear that if I leave my desk for ONE SECOND I'll lose momentum, fall into an abyss of apathy and never graduate.

But enough of that. Let's talk about stories.

My first SB10t task at hand is to prepare for a Digital Storytelling Workshop that starts in eh... approximately 12 hours. By class time tomorrow I need to have created storyboard for a memory or event that will form the frame of the production. This is what brings me back to the wonderful world of xanga: it holds about 4+ years of posts spanning the most tUmUlTuOuS years of my life. Surely something buried among these archives is worthy of visual digitization? Probably. But that's not what has caught my attention as I peruse through high school/early college content (surprise! I got distracted again!). It's the presence of the online narrative itself. Reading over my old posts has made it abundantly clear that somewhere along the way I seem to have lost my ability to tell stories! Back in the day (circa 2004) I could weave an entire xanga entry from a mere song-lyric, an observation, or a funny thought. Symptoms of overanalysis? Most definitely. But at least there was something there, some narrative process in which I convert thoughts streams to metaphors or morality tales.

As excited as I am about learning a new computer program (Final Cut Pro) and developing my skills as a filmographer, I think the best part of this workshop will be that it forces me to reexamine my role as a narrative being. I will make a story and I will make it coherent. I will make it longer than 140 characters. I will complete a sentence without referencing hyperlinks. I can do this.
Whew.

PS:

This post was directly copy-pasta'd from my xanga weblog... which brings up another goal for this spring break: CONSOLIDATE. There is no need to have five different blogs. I could either move them all here, start up a Wordpress, or buy a domain name and set up shop there. Maybe writing down this goal ON my blog will force me to take action... maybe.

Hasn't anyone in the Pentagon read Jurassic Park?

You know something's up when a project's goal is to "[eliminate] the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement." And that something is awesome.

Darpa's Biodesign research is looking into producing organisms that can live forever, be loyal (read: un-hackable) and be shut-off by a "genetically-coded kill switch." You know, just in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

The project is getting $6 million outright, but will probably benefit from the $20 mil they're pushing for a new synthetic biology program and $7.5 mil put towards improving methods of analyzing cellular genomes.

This kinda reminds me of the time in high school when we extracted the DNA out of a strawberry. Not because we did anything scientifically irresponsible groundbreaking with it, but just seeing the proteins swirling around in our little plastic tubes and knowing that that fluffy substance was the secret to the biochemical processes of life was mind-blowing.

Yeah, I don't get out much.

Full article and image credit: Wired Danger Room