Thursday, November 20, 2014

On the internet and information technology in general.

Man, I haven't written anything in a long time.
I'm really sorry about that.
I took some time off, watched a lot of Mariner's games.
I'm releasing my movie, Battle at Beaver Creek I wrote another.
Of course I'm still doing Reel Reviews with Taylor & Howe twice a week.
 But you wouldn't know any of that if it wasn't for the internet.

I've always had a computer.
Meaning: if there was a computer to be had, I had one.

Computers came onto the market in the 80s, sitting on the shelves at the Bay, Commodore 64, what not.
I couldn't afford that but by the time I was 10 or 11, I had gotten my hands on a Texas Instruments computer, (sorry, can't remember what model.) You hooked the thing up to a tape deck, spent hours programming it to do the simplest things, (like play ping pong,) then recorded the squeaks and squawks of your efforts onto a cassette tape, for later reloading.

When Apple came around I couldn't afford one of those either, but the school had a bunch and I would come to school early and stay late to fart around on them.

When I graduated my Mom bought me a Macintosh (with a 20mb external harddrive!) which I used to rock bodies and melt faces in the various awesome bands of which I have been lucky to have taken a part.

But we still had no internet.

The computer, for me, was an electronic tool. It was a one way relationship. YOU DO THIS NOW.

In the 90's, the internet arrived in my house. It swallowed my wife and kids, they wound up thousands of miles away. (I don't blame the internet for this, I was just unlucky to discover my wife thought a stranger in a chat room sounded better than I.) I only bring this up to point out that my thoughts on the matter, expressed in an unusually haphazard manner, are sourced of experiences that run deeper than the average. I will expect, as per usual, that the article, (let's call it a blog? what?) will nevertheless prove interesting, despite not actually having anything of value to say.

The internet is awesome. It's probably the greatest thing to come along since everything that came before it.

It's hard to believe that its been around 25 years.
Remember taking forever to download a single photograph of some girl's boobs, line by line?
No, oh, never mind then...

Now you can watch people kill each other live in Hi Def and surround sound.

I'm sure a person could do other things with their time: study philosophy, psychology, sociology. Create art and share it with the entire world, free.
Invent the future and make the world a better place.

No, we can't do that?
Oh, never mind then...

We currently reside in a world where we can walk up to a machine to freely give and take information of any variety. I've yet to find a question I can't answer, other than perhaps, why the hell aren't our lives any better by having all the answers?






Sunday, November 9, 2014

Battle at Beaver Creek