Also, you can go to the Rock & Republic website to see the full version in full screen. Definitely worth it.

Which also reminds me of the truly brilliant Diesel Liquid Space show from last year.

Hopefully this is the start of me getting back to a regular posting schedule again. I spent a couple months in Alberta visiting people and hitting up weddings so I wasn’t around the net much, but I’m back and settled into Vancouver now so things should start getting back to normal here.

These first two images are playing around with the Merge to HDR function in Adobe Photoshop.

And these ones were just more experiments exploring long-exposure times.

Additionally, here’s the error that Firebug caught if anyone knows what the hell it means or it might help fix the issue:

uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Window.send_to_editor
tb_show("", "[URL REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]“, false)thickbox.js (line 230)
tb_init()thickbox.js (line 26)
e(Object type=click target=img currentTarget=a.thickbox)jquery.js (line 11)
e()

[edit]

Okay, it appears that there’s a cross-domain issue caused by the “www” in front of WordPress domains. For example:

http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28 and
http://domainsname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28

are treated different and that’s why the error was showing up in Firefox. If I had just domainsname.com, then Insert Image works, but with the www. in front it did the blank white screen thing. Safari also went blank with the www in front of it. Camino though, for some reason, appears to go to the www-free domain automatically. That is, I tried entering “www” in front of the domain and it would convert it back to the www-free domain. Weird.

It appears that the WordPress URL/Blog Url under the “General” tab in “Settings” determines which domain it is that you can upload images from, so if you’re having these issues, make sure you double-check the domain that your WordPress blog is configured to and that might fix the issues.

That’s not to say I never-ever read the newspaper, occasionally I’ll pick up the Georgia Straight or the WestEnder as I’m about town, but mostly that’s to browse on upcoming shows/openings/events. [ed. note: for those that aren't based in Vancouver, the Georgia Straight/WestEnder are our alternative newspapers, that is, they're distributed for free on street corners and are driven completely through ad revenue] Next to occasionally picking up one of these two newspapers however, I never read the paper. I can’t remember the last time I bought a paper. Seriously.

Unlike previous generations (from my understanding which may be erroneous), the newspaper was never a central element to my life. It is not like I read it and then suddenly stopped. It has never been on my cultural radar.

Anyway, back to the point at hand: I spent some time thinking about this, and I believe there’s a few major reasons why I don’t read a newspaper that may provide some generic insight into why Gen Y doesn’t read the newspaper. This isn’t a definitive answer or definition of why Gen Y doesn’t read the paper, but it may give you some food for thought.

Gen Y

I would recommend this fantastic dossier as an introduction to Gen Y on ReadWriteWeb that will explain this new cultural phenomenon much better than I will. Essentially, Gen Y are the first media savvy generation that grew up completely co-existing with technology. We’re three times larger than Gen X and we consume and exchange information at exponential levels. We rely heavily on our friends for everything and have dynamic new ideas about work, social responsibilities, mass media, consumption, advertising, identity and how they all fit into our life(style). At a fundamental level, we’re a generation that’s been raised to be completely comfortable with quick, extreme change. This chameleon-like nature makes us question everything around us, especially because we’re so informed.

Competition

It’s really no secret that the internet revolutionized the availability of information unlike any other invention since Gutenberg’s Moveable Type. It’s always-on availability and the price point of blogging platforms (free), meant that publishing was no longer limited online to the web savvy or, in print, to distribution through mass media (newspapers, tv, magazines, book publishers, etc.). Within the last few years, through improved internet searching, the development of web standards, and the consequent increase in search engine optimization, the web has grown exponentially in it’s usefulness. Finding the information that you’re looking for has never been easier, which is why newspapers are losing. It’s simply impossible to provide the information that the majority of people are interested in within such a fixed format. For example, I may jump from reading about why I should invest in dividends, to researching a new workout regimine, then I’ll browse my design forum, find a link to a blog about Gen Y and read some posts there, hit up my favorite online comics, and then open up Thunderbird to check my e-mails and RSS feeds before hitting my facebook, twitter, vimeo, et al accounts to see what’s going on there. And that’s how my morning starts. It’s completely different things on different days and I may go through this browsing cycle 2-8 times per day depending on how much I feel like working and/or how close my deadlines are. Disregarding the interactive and social elements of that list, the newspapers still cannot compete with the amount of diverse interests that people have, let alone the ease of access to the information. You would need multiple papers and magazines to get even close to the breadth of content I accessed in just that one browsing cycle. That doesn’t even factor in the notoriously short attention spans Gen Y supposedly has.

Mistrust

I’m not sure if this can necessarily be designated a Gen Y trait, but one of my biggest issues with mass media today is how utterly biased/corrupted I perceive it to be. I can’t count the number of stories I’ve heard over the years of editing, short-cuttings, firings, or removal of news stories because the story referenced, directly or indirectly, one of their advertisers. That’s not to mention the sham that has been the mainstream media’s reporting for the last decade or two. It boggles my mind that The Daily Show tends to do a better job of calling a spade a spade than CNN or most of the other major news networks (and I won’t get into the dizzying obsession with and deification of celebrities that pervades mainstream media). I think Keith Olbermann might be the only saving grace on television right now. \ Although, I wouldn’t really know, since I gave up watching that garbage 5 years ago and haven’t looked back since. And no, Canadian news isn’t any better.

Why would I watch a news program whose stories are potentially being audited, edited, corrupted, or removed by politicians, owners, and advertisers. Why wouldn’t I just go to Now Public, Google, or the Blogosphere for my news? It tends to be significantly more accurate (in the case of Now Public, during the Hurricane Katrina incident, they had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff), not to mention the fact that the news coming out is not being influenced by fiscal responsibilities.

Negativity

There is not that much to say about this one, really. The news (television or in print), is bloody depressing. I remember when I was about 17 or 18 that I tried being an “informed citizen” regularly, started watching the news and reading the paper somewhat consistently and I couldn’t stand it. It was constant negative news about murder, corruption, death, etc. I made a conscious decision shortly thereafter to stop investing time in these things because I noticed it was making me overtly negative. It doesn’t mean that I stopped being informed, but I started finding ways that I could consume information as I desired it. That is, I started filtering my consumption.

I think one of the strengths of Gen Y is the inherent knowledge about media and advertising we possess. This is our culture, this is what we’ve always known, which means we’ve evolved instinctual ways to filter what we do and do not want to process. For me, the negativity of the newspaper and lack of information I was actually interested in caused me to filter it right out of my reality.

Price-Point

Once again, that isn’t to say that I never see the newspaper headlines in the convenience store, I can actually remember a number of times that they’ve grabbed my attention. But I glance at them, get a brief idea of the story, and then move on. Why? Because I know I can save that $0.25. Actually, come to think of it, are papers even that cheap anymore?

Oh. Wait. I don’t care. If the story actually grabs my interest enough for me to remember in five minutes when I get home, I’ll just look it up on the newspaper’s website and read it there. Or I’ll find one of the other twenty sites on Google that are carrying the same story. For free. I’m horrible with money, but that’s at least one lesson in frugality I can get my head around.

Plus, I don’t really want to go through the effort of going back to the cashier to pay for this paper because I sure as hell didn’t see it on my way into the store. I know where the newspapers are and they aren’t anywhere near what I’m there for. So I take a glance on my way out of the store and see if there’s anything I want to research when I get home.

And no, that isn’t a call for all your marketing specialists to start moving the papers around the stores to try and hook me better. I’ll figure out where they’ve been moved to on my next time into the store and will add it to my filter list. And if you keep moving it around, I’ll just add the entire shape to my filter list.

Now, I’m fairly decent with Flash. I can build some pretty complex interactivity into web-sites, I started to get into doing some code-based flash generative art as experiments, and I’ve learned to be fairly good at debugging and developing. However, I’ve finally come to the realization that unless I’m going to dedicate my time to becoming a programmer fulltime, there’s just no way I can keep up. For example, take some of Rodger Hodgin’s latest work (both done completely in Processing):

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.
Blog Post: Visualizing Radiohead(more info about this video)

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
Blog Post: Solar, with Lyrics (more info about this video)

Stunning pieces of work, absolutely. And you should read the blog posts that explain everything that went into making those pieces come out the way they did, it’s interesting stuff.

That being said, minus the whole degree in computer science thing that a lot of these guys probably have, a lot of it is simply a matter of putting in your hours to learn the languages. Which would be fine if it was just learning Flash, or just learning Processing, but I’m beginning to understand that you seem to have to learn multiple languages to truly develop the kind of stuff that I’m envisioning when I look at this stuff. Not to mention, you have to keep abreast of all the other developments and libraries and stuff that the community is doing.

For example, I was looking to get into playing around with some particle systems in Flash as some side experiments in the next couple days, so I downloaded the Flint Particles Library, unzipped, put it in my Flash classes directory, and promptly discovered that it has 14 different packages with what looks like over 50 different classes that you have to learn what they do and how they integrate together in order to use it. Not to mention Papervision3D which is a robust 3D rendering engine for Flash AS3. No, it’s not as powerful as an actual 3D rendering environment, but there’s some amazing things being done with it already. And some of you more nerdy readers may acknowledge that Flash is cool, but it can’t really compete with OpenGL (what most of your video games are rendered in) environments for 3D rendering. Oh, but hark, Adobe is in the process of developing Hydra… er… Pixel Bender which is “a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware”. Essentially, they’re developing the CS3 After Effects image/video processing engine to work across multiple Adobe environments (including Flash); and the language is going to be similar to GLSL (OpenGL’s Shader Library language). *boggle*

Seriously, I’m so damned excited about the possiblities of the interwebz in the coming years from these few links and I’m sure there’s tons of things I don’t even know about yet. It’s all quite exciting. But, I guess I’ve finally coming to the realization that I can’t do all of these things I’m interested in because there just isn’t enough time in a day. When I’m already having to deal with clients, standards-based development stuff, accounting (well, not anymore, I just got a book-keeper to take care of that, yay!), client maintenance, etc., your free time is stringent at best and I, personally, like to spend some of it away from the computer. I guess it’s just a matter of realizing your strengths and accepting that yes, other people can do things better than you so you should let them, as much as my ego doesn’t want to admit that. Plus, I just don’t I have the energy to devote to being that completely logical all the time. Programming is a nice challenge once in a while from the ‘creative’ side of things, but I’ll take Photoshop or Illustrator any day over 2000 lines of code.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that, if you know anyone in the Vancouver area that’s an extremely talented programmer interested in pushing the boundaries of interactivity and installation work, get them to contact me. In the meantime, I’m going to go play with After Effects, Cinema4D, VDMX and Quartz to see if I can integrate my passion for visuals and sound another way.

Other Interesting Links to Note that I found in my travels tonight:
Processing Visualization Language ported to Javascript
Adobe Open Screen Project (they’ve lifted the FLV/FL4/SWF licensing restrictions!)
Seb Lee-Delisle
Andre Michelle
Quasimondo

Okay, seriously, I don’t know what kinda vitamins or super-berries or what Reznor’s taking now that he’s sober, but apparently three albums in less than two years is no big deal.

First it was Year Zero which featured an alternate reality game building up to and coinciding with the release of the album in early 2007 (plus the Year Zero Remixed album, which fair enough is all remixed by other artists, but it’s still another project on the guy’s plate).

Then it was the lyric-free, musical 4-disc exploration Ghosts in February 2008. Additionally, coinciding with the release of Ghosts, Reznor announced a YouTube video contest to create visuals for the Ghost album.

And now, a mere three months after Ghosts, Reznor releases The Slip, for free. That’s right, he’s giving the entire album away for free online. I haven’t listened to the album yet as I just finished downloading it, but I imagine it is pure class like all of his work.

I’ve been listening to this damn song on repeat for like…. 4hrs straight. I just can’t get enough of it. I really wanna find the damn milkman now though…