NEW MEDIA: Fantasizing Reality/Realizing Fantasy

Posted on October 19, 2004 by Susan

As I sink deeper and deeper into the technical fantasy world of New Media, I learn more and more about the human mind–at least mine (which is the only one I can say I even vaguely comprehend), and the phenomenal workings of the brain…the ultimate New Media prototype with its buttons and triggers and timelines and modules.

The concepts are staggering.

I need to sort them out and contrast and compare New Media methods to the human brain. But right now, my mind is racing around finding all the elements that comprise the system into a working narrative sequence of visual, audio, and key frames.

I’ll be back…

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REALITY: Six-thirty a.m.

Posted on October 18, 2004 by Susan

Yellow-gray clouds over red-orange horizon.

Whatever happened to white, blue and green?

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New Media: Powerpoint (Updated)

Posted on October 17, 2004 by Susan

ooh, ooh, ooh!

Just learned how to turn a Powerpoint presentation into a website!

Update: That evidently only I can see…

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REALITY: Stretching Skins

Posted on October 17, 2004 by Susan

It’s easy to see it in the young: The growing of the inside pushing at the outside until it can’t push any more at chubby cheeks blown up with knowing. Puberty is a shedding of the shell that can no longer adjust, that snaps and splits in explosive bursting of seams overnight.

What steps out is rounded handfuls and lipsticked pouts, or hairy and lumbering with highwater pants. This new version is planned out with plenty of empty space inside–in the brain, in the heart–to expand, while the skin stretches slowly to keep it all in. Sometimes the steam builds, and faucets are vented; sometimes it rattles the mind.

Soon there are things other than lipstick and ME; things that adhere themselves in symbiotic embrace. Striped ties and children, houses like bras, friendships that travel in internet space, jobs that are ladders to clouds.

All that is stored in the pulsating mass is knowledge that knows how and when. It knows, too, when to unbutton the top of one’s head, and fly out the hole, or crawl from a danger, to dry off and flex in the new space and time.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: Non-Gender Based Marriage

Posted on October 16, 2004 by Susan

Never thought I’d put my thoughts on it down here. Try to stay away from political and societal issues that are, after all, decisions made based on more than fact; personal opinions arise from moral convictions, religious beliefs, and like today, experience.

Working in the frameshop, a knock on the door that makes me look up to spot through the French door widow panes a face peering in. Always get a kick out of people knocking on a barn door–but then, how many barns have double French doors? They shield their eyes and look in through the panes. I see them standing there looking for me. Today, it was a face I hadn’t seen in maybe thirteen years.

We hugged, we clung to each other with tears in our eyes. She brought in her mother, and her life partner. She’d been living in Boston for ten years or so, and I’d just kept up with her through a mutual friend from the next town over where all three of us served on the volunteer ambulance corps. I knew she was gay, and I’d heard that she and her friend had raised three kids into college since they’d been together. Just as happy for them as I’d been two weeks ago for Louis and his fiancee, Carol when they stopped in just before their wedding, I was delighted to see how happy S. was with her partner, L., and how accepting her 90-year old mom was. I’d spent much time with S. when we both lived in Harwinton, and knew her mother well.

We spent well over an hour catching up, trading e-mail addresses and phone numbers as they planned to leave. I hugged them all as they stepped outside to their car. Then I told her how neat it was that Louis had just stopped by, how great it was to see old friends, and that Louis had gotten married.

The look on S.’s face hit home hard. Here she was, introducing someone she’d lived with for over a decade but couldn’t call a spouse.

It’s made me rethink a lot of what I thought were pretty set but fair decisions on the non-heterosexual marriage laws.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS: Parallel Narrative Structures

Posted on October 16, 2004 by Susan

What some of us have been feeling, Danny Gregory puts into words at Everyday Matters:

“But ever since the debates began, I feel an overwhelming need to flip to the end of the book and find out how it all turns out. I am probably taking this election far too seriously, but I find the only blogging pleasure I am getting these days is from politicos prognosticating every few minutes about the latest AP tidbit. As a result, I am cynical and judgmental.”

Literature has always been affected by and has effected political environment, good or bad. But it often cholesterolizes the creative arteries.

Time is the bypass. Surgery is scheduled for early November.

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REALITY & NEW MEDIA: The Struggle

Posted on October 15, 2004 by Susan

Left brain fighting with the right brain for attention. Logic suppressing creativity; fantasy has no place in formula.

Textbook and notebooks full of figures and graphics; notebooks full of graphics and words. Give up, go to the computer. Software arranges figures in columns, press buttons and more figures come out. Switch programs. Software arranges words in columns and rows, graphics in colors other than black.

When worlds collide, I seek reality of doing without thinking. Shepard’s Pie made in rows of ground beef, yellow corn, mounded mashed potatoes with rings of onions on top. Four layers within a circle, cut into segments–a pie chart is all I can see.

Taking a break, watching tv, I reach for the mouse to change channels.

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REALITY: Mid-terms

Posted on October 15, 2004 by Susan

I knew it, I knew it! It seems to happen every single year.

The sun gets pissed because the flora and fauna are sick and tired of the photosynthesis project and don’t want to do it anymore. It’s just been about four months, but youth has no patience for what has already been learned, and is anxious to go on to the next step of the process. It gets all cranky and before you know it, the subject is stored and abandoned.

So the sun is gone, the clouds try to compensate with rain, but it’s useless. The kids leave and blow their separate ways in the wind.

But the sun is ancient and wise. He does little during the winter, maybe he reads in the white glare of snowflakes. Eventually he’ll prepare for the next class of the new Spring semester.

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NEW MEDIA & REALITY: Words of Wisdom

Posted on October 14, 2004 by Susan

If there’s anyone out there reading this, who is younger than me and who has a dream, an idea, even the slightest twinge of an urge:

DO IT. DO IT NOW!

I’ll explain this as soon as the thoughts in my own brain settle down from their whirling around in my head to be half-comprehensible.

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NEW MEDIA: Toys

Posted on October 14, 2004 by Susan

Well it’s 2:30 in the morning and I’ve found myself a new computer game: Powerpoint.

When I got Microsoft Office 2000, I purchased the Small Business Edition which didn’t include Powerpoint and I didn’t think I’d ever have use for it versus some of the other programs included in the SBE suite. What I tried to work with for a New Media project was an old version of Powerpoint I reinstalled from a Windows Office 3.1 (yes, 1994!) and tried to work with that. But it proved too frustrating to get what we needed, so I was able to purchase an upgrade of Powerpoint 2000 separately and I’m teaching myself that as I work on a storyboard flowchart as well as a slide show for the project.

Lots more fun than the Minitab Statistics program.

Oddly enough, I’m enjoying the creative end of production of a narrative much more than I thought I would. The kicker is that what I’m doing is so primitive compared to what’s available and what (I hope) I can get into further down the line.

Uh-oh. There’s a little voice in the back of my head whispering that I really, really need to take some computer graphics courses… (Professors Timmons and Ersinghaus will remember my “Christmas Catalog” version of Spinning that I put together with the thought of a Jaguar British racing green and saddle interior with a red font metaphor for “hot.”)

Wonder if I’ll ever end up with that degree when I keep putting off the “required” courses to take the ones I want to take instead. But this does confirm one thing to me: I’m glad I’ve put the Bachelor’s out of my priority lineup and decided to go for the courses that are exciting, interesting, or more in line with what I want to accomplish. Of course I’ve racked up over 70 credits already for a 60 credit program, and it looks like by the time I graduate I’ll end up with at least 80 or 90!

But the purpose of this education, for me at this time at least, is to learn what I want to learn. The need-to’s come in with their formal training of thought process, and I suppose the bonus is just the extra different ways of approaching life and whatever it throws at you.

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EDUCATION: Testing

Posted on October 13, 2004 by Susan

Facing a quiz almost every single class session is annoying. Noticing my stress, my husband made the remark that I’m studying to pass a test, rather than studying to learn what I’m doing. That made me stop and think.

In class, I write down every word and figure on the board as the instructor puts it down, knowing that this is an example of what he/she is teaching. In the meantime, as I’m still copying from the board, the explanation given is missed because I’m still scribbling. Hubby may be right; I’m missing the understanding of the concept even though I have it all down in writing.

Without understanding the concept fully, although it makes perfect sense in the classroom setting, going to do the homework or studying for that inevitable quiz is that much harder for me.

Maybe, even after all these years, I haven’t learned the knack of learning.

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REALITY & NEW MEDIA: Reality & Fantasy

Posted on October 12, 2004 by Susan

Walking quickly to the house, away from work and cold. It takes too long to sit there with a match to start the propane heater. Shivering from the wind that blows in through the cracks and chills the bones so that I’m shivering still.

I cannot see a future, but the past was just last week. The warmth from sun and windless Indian Summer. I want it back.

Can I just close my eyes and travel back in time or has it disappeared completely just because I never took a picture?

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TECHNOLOGY: Paths

Posted on October 12, 2004 by Susan

We, and then of course, I, have often discussed narrative structure and paths in the past few years, having been forced to acknowledge them by literature and writing classes. We all know they exist, we all try to ignore them. Hence, decisions–the paths life takes–are usually avoided, put off, or met with anxiety and trepidation. (NOTE: There are some people who love facing up to all kinds of decisions, big and small. They can be considered power-hungry or oblivious of the grand scheme of things, if you happen to not be one of them but are surrounded by them daily. Otherwise, they’re normally good folks.)

But when the paths are crossroads, not two directional forks, but major intersection, double lanes in all directions types, it is not the gentle fantasy of imagination, but the blaring horns of oncoming traffic that is the setting or the environment. Yesterday was such a day, and once again, the upgrading of three computers, four software programs, and two operating systems were all to be juggled while crossing the street.

If I upgrade to Windows XP from Windows 98 (which I love, but will have to step up from shortly) and the New Office XP or 2003, and Microsoft’s insistence that I purchase separate programs for each computer (although I would call and try to reason with them on this), would it not be cheaper to merely buy at least one new computer system or two with the latest software installed and finagle the other(s) with the memory and hard drives, etc. currently inside? I need better sound cards, video cards, CPU and whatelse on at least one computer. But then again, the purpose of my shop computer is to be able to work on things on company time (don’t frown–the company’s mine), and certain things need to be compatible.

So yesterday and today still, the cars are racing through from all directions, and they’re labeled with computer peripherals and software programs. Shall I stop and look both ways, or shall I close my eyes and run across the highway?

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REALITY: Morning Through Sounds

Posted on October 12, 2004 by Susan

No sense using sight sense this morning; it is black, and closing my eyes makes it no blacker. But it is cold and windy, that I can tell. The wind is noisy in its huffing and puffing to blow my house down. Then silence, the space in between when nothing exists because nothing is known, felt, seen or heard.

Then the wind reassures me it is there with a great gusty blow, and the leaves of tall maples are forced to sing along so they’re out there too. And because I hear them, so am I.

New Media Moment: The black screen lightens, speeding up morning. But the sound adds drama to the moments of time. It tells us what we cannot see is there.

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REALITY: Hyperlinking Through the Day

Posted on October 11, 2004 by Susan

Just another of those days spent bouncing off of walls I didn’t think were there. Imagining transparent sheets clunking down between me and every goal. Each plan is led astray; by Gates’ Microsoft conglomeration; by three thousand miles, by Christopher Columbus and his ocean and by me.

New Media Moment: The paths are not always paths, but detours. Hyperlinks are roadblock-boxes yelling Stop! Going backwards then, must be in the plan as well; and well accounted for in space of distance and in time, just as reality–even more so than in text. For in the written world we write it out.

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