Our shrinking world

Did a vlog today. I will link it later. I wish I had the energy to spice it up a little, but nope. It’s pretty much just me talking. Damn.

But first, some neat stuff to share.

Like the sad yet amusing tale of the poor fellow who accidentally broadcast ten minutes of hardcore porn on the Jumbotron in a train station in China.

He had been hired to fix said Jumbotron, and in doing so, had connected his laptop to it. One thing led to another and he decided to watch some porn on his laptop, forgetting it was still plugged in.

And he got away with it for ten minutes before someone called him and told him what he was doing. One can only imagine the acute onset of shame and humiliation that poor fellow must have felt at that moment. I can picture him getting the call, getting the news, spending a few moments frozen in horror while staring at the connection between his laptop and the Jumbotron, then lunging at said connection and yanking it out like he was yanking his own nuts out of a fire.

The damage is done, though. I can only assume he is fired. Very very fired. But he has also be taken into custody by the police. I am not sure how criminal law works in China, but I can only imagine that the authorities are currently busy figuring what, exactly, to charge him with.

Public mischief? Disorderly conduct? Corruption of minors? Illegal downloading? There are a lot of possible choices here. Odds are they will charge him with something minor, give him a slap on the wrist, and let the public humiliation be punishment enough.

If it was entirely up to me, I wouldn’t charge him at all. That is exactly the sort of prank I would love to pull on purpose. People need to relax about sex and realize that seeing people fuck does not actual scramble your brain cells.

Even if a few kids saw it, it will not hurt them. Their parents being all weird and upset about it, that might hurt them. But the porn will have no effect. They filter out what they do not understand.

Another news story : the fellow who sold the “sure to be the next big thing” social networking site Bebo (heard of it? Me neither. ) to AOL for 850 million dollars (where the hell do they get these huge gobs of cash, anyhow?) has now bought it back, on a whim, for a million bucks.

According to the Bebo wiki entry, Bebo was a Facebook clone and buying it from its founders for so much was “one of the worst decisions of the dotcom era”, which is saying something.

I can only assume that the sales pitch was something like “it will be like Facebook, but you will own it!” and that made dollar signs pop up in AOL CEO Randy Falco’s eyeballs, completely missing that all important “getting people to sign up for and use a site that only does what their Facebook account does” step.

Classic business catastrophe caused by irrational exuberance. I can only imagine the people who got that nearly a billion dollars, Bebo co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch, were insanely happy with the deal. They must have felt pretty freaking smug about it.

And so for one of them, Michael, to buy back the company for around 0.12 percent of the what he got for it, and to do it pretty much just for the hell of it, is downright hilarious.

Next, we have this performance from America’s Got Talent.

Amazing, electrifying stuff. Got a standing O from the judges, which has to be encouraging. Blew the audience away. That young man’s act is pure dynamite, and I hope he goes far, though to be honest, I can’t even imagine what he could add to that act.

Take that, Shields and Yarnell!

Finally, we have my vid du jour, which is just me talking.

When I was done recording, I was quite surprised to realize that I had talked for around ten minutes. It didn’t feel like that long when I was doing it. I am not sure if I should be worried about that or what.

And yeah, today it’s just a philosophical vlog entry. I suppose I shouldn’t beat myself up over that. Lots of people have successful YouTube lives based entirely on talking to the camera.

I thought about trying to dig up a lot of pictures to use to illustrate the points I was making. It would not have been too hard, I am talking about pretty concrete things in this talk.

But I just do not have the energy needed to go hunt up enough pictures to cover a ten minute talk. That would be a hell of a lot of pictures. Even if the picture only changed every 20 seconds (way too slow), that would be thirty images right off the top.

And if it was at a more reasonable and watchable speed, like say changing every three seconds, then we are talking 200 images and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Of course, the argument could be made that I would not need so many pictures if I just got to the point faster, with no digressions, no ums and uhs, and with a single clear target in mind.

Certainly, a lot of the most successful web video content is short and extremely high density, and I do not know how to do that yet. I am not the sort of person who focuses down their thoughts like that very easily, and what’s more, when I try, I tend to lost interest in it.

A single target high speed high density video just seems boring to me, even though I quite enjoy other people’s examples of such.

I guess us thinkers prefer the broad and rambling plains of the realm of ideas instead of the narrow constraints of the delivery of information.

Still, I could learn to be a bit quicker about it.

2 thoughts on “Our shrinking world

  1. You can get a lot of decent-quality clip art (line art, photos, and vector images) at clker.com. I get a lot of fillos there to break up the text in my zine. Just avoid the tacky cartoony ones and use the realistic line art and photos.

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