Happy Tuesday

So I started to react to something I saw over on FACEPLACE this morning...then I stopped.  The whole idea of getting off that site was to go back to having fun on the internet, treating it as a playground rather than a gulag.  That may sound naive to some but hey you gotta roll with what you got, right?  For me, especially after yesterday (I apologize for the TMI and will reign myself in the future) I need to put some serious efforts into lightening up.

Yesterday was good though, after a bad start.  How bad can it be if I get paid to play in After Effects and Premiere al;l day, honing my skills for whatever I feel like doing for myself after hours.  I may actually get this whole "9 to 5 job" thing eventually.  Additionally I had the pleasant surprise of feeling like, at least for a bit, that the people I work with "had my back".

Turning my passion into my job for all those years only succeeded it dulling my edge and driving a flaming stake through my passion.  Now I am trying the alternative and it is kinda cool. 

Part of that is getting back to working on my own projects, which when you are employed means something different then when you are freelancing.  When you are freelancing, well then you have to consider all the possibilities of "monetizing" your work...which is like creative saltpeter to me.  When you have a "Day Jobbe" though, and thus a source of income outside of your creative endeavors, you are free to let your mind wander.  Doing something that is not commercially viable is often good for your soul, if you are freelance though it can be hazardous to your health.

We can remember your time on FACEBOOK for you...wholesale.

After months and months of dry air, both broiling hot and frigid, it is raining nicely here in Sonoma county.  Big heavy wet drops that hit the ground like jelly beans and spreading into puddles that both amuse and freeze my bare feet when I invariably go out to get something from one of the cars or move the laundry. It's nice but considering the months of dryness I cannot see it doing a whole lot to offset months and months of dryness.  I have lived in California the majority of my life and I have never experienced a year that was so dry.

FAST FOREWORD:

A couple of hours later.  I just finished watching TOTAL RECALL, the new one not the Arnie movie.  It was actually a better movie than the original and felt more like a Phillip K. Dick story.  I have loved Dick's work since college, I guess it spoke to my innate paranoia.  It is disturbing though that a lot of what his psychotic, drug altered brain pictured in terms of a dystopian future has become so close to the reality that we live in everyday. I think if Phillip were to rise from the grave he would take one look at the world, shrug his shoulders and say "I Told you so".

Almost to the end of my first week pretty much unplugged from FACEBOOK, aside from the odd "like" or comment, and my brain seems to be coming out of a social media haze and into the light of reality.  During all those months when I was trapped inside with no transportation and no gas money if I did have have wheel I began far too reliant on social media for human contact.  The trouble was the contact was filtered heavily and if there is no actual air between you and the person you are talking to the contact can't really be considered "human".  At best it is "human like".

We have been flooded with a storm of "Your Facebook Movie" links the past few weeks.  I even looked at my own.  An interesting attempt conceived by a marketing wag to automate intimacy, using cherry picked artifacts freely shared on the site (easily garnered by stored information) combined with a sentimental soundtrack to create an automatic tear generator.

"OOOO! Look I remember that!"

When I was working in games I used to have to remind the programmers that every person we were writing the games for did NOT have a top of the line computer on their desk and that we this had to "dumb down" aspects of the game to compensate for that.  Sadly, there is no such rational voice in the halls of the marketing department of FACEBOOK telling their staff to tread lightly on the hearts of their users.

SFO - Waiting #1

Sitting near Gate 76A in the UNITED Terminal at SFO, flight is not for an hour or two so I a doing the usual "SFO CHARGER WALL" thing, which means I am sitting next to an outlet with the Macbook plugged into the wall and the iPhone plugged into the MACbook.  Additionally my now-returned-wandering-iPad is taking up the other socket.

I call the iPad that  because I was so intent on guarding the black case with the Camera gear in it that I left it at a gate when Director and I went to grab breakfast.  Luckily the SFPD picked it up before some light fingered Louie and it was quickly returned to me.

Of course if you came to this post from FACEBOOK you already know that..at least today.  Social media is like traveling in the TARDIS, posts like this are like fixed points in time...unchanging through the years unless edited.  The timeline on FACEBOOK on the other hand is like an ever moving stream.  You mention a post and then it moves on, the current sweeping foreword with the news of the day and photos of what you ate.  Static "old skool" stuff like BLOG posts and news stories stay fixed like reefs or rocks protruding from the ever moving torrent.  Unfortunately the current that is the social media is driven by the same force as drives the motion of our lives, leaving static words like a message in a bottle.

On the way to SFO my Director and I were discussing how fast everyone drives and, by extension, how they live their lives.  There is always that rush, like a Silver BMW snaking through traffic in a hurry to get...somewhere.  We, on the other hand, "maintain an even strain" as we obey the traffic laws.  The end result is predictable.  On 19th Ave we find ourselves behind the same Silver BMW whose frenetic charge through the herd earned him the right...to be 12 feet ahead of us.