[Poet Zero]

excitement over the device, it’s “always on” internet philosophy. Incidentally, this is also where he – at least initially- begins to run into problems.

It is worth noting here that the capabilities of this tablet are not known and simply based upon widely agreed upon requirements and rumors but nothing is known for sure.

Lyons focuses on the internet capabilities of the tablet in particular the “always on” feature of a connection to the web. He neglects to mention that this constant connection to the net will not be a feature of the tablet but simply a capability. The net has toll booths to reach the “always on” lane – wireless carriers. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint namely are the gatekeepers of the web. If you want the ability to have the internet at your finger tips 24/7 (ignoring network problems) anywhere (that service is offered) at high speeds (in even less places than service is offered) then be prepared to write monthly checks of $50 and upwards for this privilege. Here is the first problem with Lyons’ argument. The introduction of a new device does not magically destroy the greatest barrier to ubiquitous internet: cost. Until internet is available everywhere (rural areas discounted for the sake of argument) at high speeds instead of the crawling 3G we see now (3G ranges from 385Kbps, slower than the lowest tier of DSL, to 7.2Mbps though this speed is hardly ever obtained). This is dramatically worse in actual practice than the consistent speeds a hard line grants you at your home. Until true high speed wireless internet is available, and new format called WiMAX seems to be the answer to this cry, internet browsing will remain painfully slow.

Further stymieing the would-be media consumer is the draconian data caps these carriers institute. It is not uncommon to be limited to only 3GB of transfer over the course of a month. That’s about 125 youtube videos or just over 4 a day. When you factor in images, audio, and longer videos, the amount of daily surfing you can perform without surpassing your cap and paying hefty overage charges is minuscule. Data caps will prevent new media if they persist in their current form. Even worse than mobile data capping is the

Last and most prominent is the problem of coverage. While the major carriers have done a commendable job blanketing the large cities in their wireless access systems, coverage is wildly inconsistent and prone to dropout. Some locations will receive the full benefit 3G+ speeds while others are reduced to 1G sub dial-up browsing making media consumption essentially impossible.

Second, the rumored price of the tablet generally centers around $800. $800 is a lot for a device only slightly more portable than a laptop at a considerable decrease in power. Again, this raises a problem of ubiquity. Should a new media system arise, it must be ubiquitously available. An $800 access fee is unreasonable for such a luxury.

Too expensive is what sums up the rumored Tablet. It will attempt to create a niche between a laptop and a phone but will be priced beyond many laptops (a casualty of the “apple-tax”). Too expensive to purchase, too expensive to gain it’s most important feature: a constant connection.

Lyons, despite his misguided insistence the Apple tablet will trigger this paradigm shift, makes a good point on the future of media. Video is becoming increasingly important to the ADHD culture of online consumption. YouTube serves over 1 billion videos to users every day and streaming video represents over 50% of all internet traffic. Online news consumption has increased as well strengthening the idea we aren’t consuming less information but rather simply changing where we get it from.

Lyons describes the current state of online media simply as the availability of media online: TV shows on Hulu, news on nytimes.com. This is phase one of the internet, the variety show of radio brought to television. He stops there simply predicting we are on the precipice of the start of stage 2 declaring he cannot know what this new era holds for us instead looking towards the storytellers of grade school who are growing up in this new media world. This change is undeniably coming but I’d like to offer some further insights into what this new media may be built off of in an upcoming article. Stay tuned or perhaps it would be more appropriate to type keep refreshing.

This particular file is a recording of a heavy rainstorm, in particular rain recorded beneath a screened porch with a tin roof, encoded as a 16bit 48khz WAV file. Below is a low bitrate example of the sound effect that can be played by clicking below. The full file can be downloaded HERE (right click save as).

Click to Sample: Heavy Rain

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

For me, stories are not created but discovered. Whether sprung out of our physical experiences, the experiences of others, or our imaginative experiences, we are not the creators. That original leading character –  a composite of your subconscious, your strange Uncle Jeffery, and that dream your friend told you about seven months previously. That innovative location and event – just intellectual and creative vomit from old news broadcasts, childhood vacations, and pictures from the daydreams of your geography class. This is our imagination, a melt of memories forging gleaming ingots of fresh story.

But these stories, they come from our imagination. Our imagination is the convoluted conglomerate of a life lived and imagined and consequently capable of creation through reformation. In this minor facet, yes we are creators, but on a grander scale, we’ve been discovering bits and pieces of our stories throughout our lives. But more important than the arguable truth of this notion is in the way it influences how we find our stories.

With the mindset that we must create or make up an idea, forming a story is a daunting task. We have to force our mind into submission and struggle with it in order to create a unique conception on command, a task we all struggle with as evidenced with the long periods we spent trying to come up with our stories. But what if we change our viewpoint? What if, instead of wrestling with the task of creation we instead focus on the simple act of discovery. Discovery, for stories, is a moment that can occur at anytime, anywhere. Our lives are filled with characters and their stories, they travel around us constantly throughout our day, and if we make the effort to open our eyes and watch for quirks, listen for one-liners, and let our imagination combine what we see and what we know, finding a story becomes as easy as a walk in the park.

So what was lost? Everything. What was I able to recover? Some stuff. The recovery process is a work in process and much of the older material was easily recovered. My latest stuff, however, will take a bit longer. I was hoping to have everything repaired by the time I posted my next entry but the work of restoring is too slow and boring to finish in time. What now? Well, as you may or may not have noticed, the site underwent a redesign that hopefully doesn’t have as many bugs as the old style. This new theme should also make navigation simpler.

Looking towards the future, I’m going to continue restoring old work and start adding new stuff again. I hope to restart the daily download section and let it live up to it’s name. The world can always use more free, high-quality sound effects. Additionally, I have a new project nearing completion that I hope to have running by the end of the year. Keep checking here for more details.

Thanks for sticking around. Keep your firewalls nice and toasty.

~David Torcivia

UPDATE (Oct 13, 2009 01:18):

So all posts are now up. Many comments have been lost, I’m sorry but there were no backups made of these. The only thing remaining to fix is to adjust the new link locations for the old files so the pictures and other files can be found. This will not affect new posts nor any of the posts currently at the first several pages of the site. As I find the time I will repair the other files in a reverse chronological order. Thanks again for sticking through this all!

UPDATE (Oct 13, 2009 13:00):

All comments have been restored! The posting date for many of them is incorrect instead displaying the time they were restored but it’s better than nothing. Full steam ahead!

The pilot episode desperately needed both a copilot and air traffic control to guide the audience through the tangled mess of characters. What amounted to a little less than 20 minutes of character introductions left me feeling confused and separated from the cast. The only name I caught and could hold on to was Scottie, the bumbling “hero” of the show. I preface hero with quotes as I’m not sure how Scottie is intended to come across. I understand he is a character lost in time as his friends and college life pass him by finally forcing a new outlook on who Scottie is and what he wants to become. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Scottie understands this. Hadjii, through his writing and performance, created a character without conviction, without goals, without crippling vices, and certainly without virtues. He is lackluster and unlikable – a jellyfish floating listlessly through life.

Scottie’s on-screen accompaniment is composed of one dimensional stereotypes who, through their generally over-the-top performance, further serve to diminish Scottie as even remotely interesting. The stereotypical portrayal of the self-centered girlfriend, insult guy, hungry man, sexed up athlete, revolutionary, and wise uncle limit the show to correspondingly clichéd humor. The jokes are expected, occasionally derogatory, and in general unimpressive to me. While I may not be able to relate to the humor, I find that it is in direct contrast to one of the messages of the pilot. Scottie, attending a black support group, listens to complaints of how the media distorts the image of black with stereotypes – essentially the premise of Somebodies. Scottie refutes this, though mostly concentrates on some cookies, by asking who cares. “Who cares?” The perfect two word review of Somebodies.

The second episode, freed from having to attempt to introduce characters, brings us a generic, predictable predicament that is the staple of sitcom humor. It once again thrusts Scottie into a situation he must cope with, unfortunately Scottie’s “do nothing” attitude is his motivating characteristic. Hadjii, instead of forcing Scottie to do something and make an uncomfortable situation hilarious, has Scottie sit around and watch what happens. Consequently, the audience is sitting and watching a character who mostly sits and watches. No character arc is formed, no definite goal defined. Adding further insult is the sheer implausibility of the situation: a cheap, poor neighbor who loads his house full of expensive electronics and fine furnishings but refuses to buy a phone for $50 a month thus saving him and his family an enormous inconvenience of having to visit their boring neighbor.

I would write more but to be honest, I have no idea what almost all the character’s are named and I’ve forgotten most of the plot even after consulting the notes I took. This makes it difficult to comment, constructive or otherwise. In brief, Somebodies is a muddled, uninspired sitcom minus the comedy. I suppose you could call it a “sit” which is the last thing I would want to do if Somebodies appeared on my television screen.

So tell me, tell me what scenes demand the use of a handkerchief, which scenes you must watch in the dark to hide your sopping eyes, which scenes make you smile with tears of joy, which scenes shake you to your core. Tell me what does it for you, and then tell me why.

I almost never work alone. Even in the earliest stages of production, the very genesis of the original idea, I find that a group is far more capable than an individual. When alone, my ideas stagnate. I’ll come up with a situation and after a few minutes of intense thought, dismiss it. A group, however, offers the opportunity to present an idea and have it be rejected, accepted, or bounced around evolving into a far improved and refined creation. There are the occasional ideas I get, however, that I keep to myself for a while as soak them up, reflecting on what possibilities they offer. These, more developed ideas, are still presented to the group process and benefit greatly from the practice.

When the entire group is stuck for new ideas (a rare occurrence with a decent sized group), we play a “what if” game hypothesizing extraordinary situations from everyday occurrences. While most ideas generated from this method are silly, several have proven to be very promising and are currently in a development stage. Occasionally, when focusing on a character piece, we’ll simply imagine an interesting individual and get to know them by discussing them and the details of their lives. If the discussion doesn’t evolve into a story itself, the character often finds their way into a future project. Finally, if we remain lost for inspiration, the group will imagine existing stories and situations and re-imagine them from a different angle be it a new character’s perspective, a different time period, or similar variables.

Notes are taken during this entire process and by the end of an hour or so, we have several ideas that are ready to be turned into stories. This is the beginning of, what is for me, the most difficult part of the creative process: the fleshing out of an idea into a story. While I love to prepare the background ideas and characters, I struggle in lining everything up and imagining the completed tale. Outlining helps me get through this phase but I still struggle with the act of writing. Finding the will power to sit and cover an empty page with start of my fiction can prove to be a nearly insurmountable task for me. This is where I currently find myself with several pieces of work, including, for several days, this one.

Multiple Logins: You can now login with an IntenseDebate account, Twitter, Facebook, openID, or remain anonymous as a guest. OpenID uses the login information from popular services such as Google Accounts or Yahoo and allows you to login into hundreds of thousands of sites across the net with that same information. The Twitter login offers the ability to tweet a link to your response and the article. Facebook may send a link to your response to your wall depending on the allowances you give the site when signing up. This means you do not have to go through the process of creating a new account to simply comment.

Threaded Conversations: Keep the conversation rolling by replying directly to a comment. Instead of digging around, trying to figure out who was replying to what, you know have a simply visual indication of where the discussion originated from.

Karma Ranking: See a response you like? Give it a thumbs up. Someone say something dumb? Thumbs down. Vote on good and bad points to give a visual representation of your sentiments.

Report Comments: Someone say something blatantly offensive and obscene? Spammers hijacking the thread? Report it. An administrator will make short work of the miscreants.

Notifications: Made a comment, left, and returned a weeks later to find someone responded seconds after you posted? Email notifications of comment replies make sure you stay relevant in the conversation and don’t have to resort to constantly reloading a page looking for responses.

I hope you enjoy the new system and that it really does inspire intense debate.

What is RSS?

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a system that arose at the turn of the millennium for syndicating new content. This was the era that marked the rise of the first great news portals which would pull new media from the web and aggregate it for consumption. Content creators needed a universally standard method to notify these news distributors of their stories and soon embraced the fledgling system that was RSS 0.9.

RSS 0.9 and subsequent editions to the latest and most prolific RSS 2.0 made reading and spreading stories simple. It wasn’t long until RSS readers sprung up for mass consumption. Initially available only in downloadable form, there are now a glut of capable reader websites which make reading blogs, news websites, status updates, album releases, and a million other site types simple and efficient. Google Reader, Netvibes, Feedblitz, and Yahoo are a few of the many RSS readers available for free online.

On a basic technical level, the way the system works is simple. A new post is written on a site. The site automatically parses the entire post – text, images, video, and audio – into a standardized file which lives on the server. So if I wrote a new post at viatorci.com/trees.html the server will generate a viatorci.com/trees.rss file. RSS readers that have subscribed to the site “ping” the webhost at definite intervals checking to see if new information has been posted. Alternatively, the originating site can send out it’s own ping notifying agents of new content as well. Regardless, the information is sent out and shows up in the reader as unread. All you have to do is login and new posts from dozens of different websites are available right before you at a single location.

The advantage this offers is that instead of visiting dozens of sites everyday to read the news, you can quickly check a single location. Additionally, if there are no updates, you can see instantly and don’t waste your time with pointless checking. Last, and perhaps most helpful, is that you can see if a post interests you and if doesn’t, then easily skip it, without having to navigate through a complex website littered with ads (there are almost never ads in RSS feeds – a definite plus).

A Brief Guide to Google Reader

To use Google Reader, you must first have a Google account. If you have a Youtube or GMail account, then you already have one and may simply login. If not, one can be created quickly and at no cost. Once you navigate toreader.google.com, you simply login.

Upon login, you will be greeted by some guides instructing you on the use of Google Reader. I recommend perusing them but if you’re the type to throw away instructions, then simply proceed to the Home page on the top of the left menu. Alternatively, you can skip this step and move directly on to subscribing but your screen may not match mine.

To add a website, click the “Add a subscription” button above the left menu. It will open up and prompt you to “Enter a search term to find feeds or paste a feed url.” Simply type or paste the address of the site you are trying to read (in the case I entered viatorci.com) and press “Add”.

Congratulations! You’re now using RSS and streamlining your workflow. If you look at the left hand column under “Subscriptions”, you will see the site has been added and is bold with a number beside it. The heavy lettering indicates there are unread stories and the number tells you how many. Simply click on the site name and it will load the stories in the main frame window. Click somewhere in the main window to mark it as read. To quickly scroll through stories, press “J” to go forward and “K” to go back. If you want to view the story on the site to load a video or comment on it, simply click the title of the post in the main window, you will be redirected to the original post.

That’s it! You can add as many subscriptions as you like. Additionally, Google Reader offers you the ability to create folders to organize websites, the ability to star and like posts, and many other options that this guide does not address. Spend a while poking around and you should be able to figure it out with too much trouble. Enjoy all your new found spare time that’s coming your way thanks to the efficiency of RSS.