Concept: Select 10 self-generated images that express something about you. My twitterbuddy @HoorayCookies did this on her blog (click this post’s title to link there) and I like it. I also like my image collection. So here.

This was pen tablet practice, part of my ongoing effort to get a webcomic started.

It’s a flashlight. And a magnet. And a frickin laser beam.

On the way to see The Watchmen, I was overcome with the sheer verticality of what Rick was doing.

Someone was comparing me to a celebrity. I offered this handy spotting guide to avoid mixups.

He’s sticking his tongue out.

Built that.

Three angry dogs in a Honda Odyssey.

I remember when I first used a computer to connect to another computer with a modem. It was a 286 PC with a CGA monitor, I think I was about 11 (it was right before my Hogwarts letter arrived), and it was awesome. I assumed WarGames was a realistic image of what an enthusiastic kid could do with a computer, so I was eager to explore the world’s top-secret databases.

In actual fact, the computer we were connected to was running IDEAnet, the Indiana Department of Education Anteater network (I may not be completely accurate on the acronym). It wasn’t ARPAnet, but thanks to Ferris Bueller, it was still a Matthew Broderick-equivalent level of access. I couldn’t change my grades–they weren’t actually tracked on computer yet–but my mother could get whatever teacher-related stuff she needed from it, and I soon discovered I could look at salary figures for any public school employee. This was deeply humanizing information in my eyes, and I think I defended my teachers to my friends as real people a little more vehemently because of it. It wasn’t blackmail-worthy, because the underpaid teacher is a stock punchline. But it drove home the point that soon, EVERYTHING would be connected via modems and  there would be no limit to what you could learn if you were willing to scan enough phone numbers.

This was not the Internet. That came a few years later. We were active members of Prodigy, an online community which at the time was the sexy GUI alternative to CompuServe. What it did not offer was user-selectable IDs. For years, I gave people my email address (bnmx41b@prodigy.net, or possibly .com; well that’s going to keep me awake) and was indignant when they acted like it was hard to remember. AOL made this particularly bothersome, with their handles that you selected yourself and contained actual words. The fact that Prodigy introduced several of the core features that AOL used to become popular was outweighed by the fact that Prodigy never figured out how to turn innovation into actual success. On Prodigy, there was some click-to-turn-page graphic novel content, a sci-fi turn-based play-by-email game called Rebel Space, and bulletin boards where I first learned to communicate with people who only existed through text. Prodigy’s censorship and content control were remarkably ahead of their time; even Comcast has yet to suggest plans to ban users from referring to each other by their real names.

This was still not the Internet. When the Internet did arrive, it pretty much killed Prodigy. They experimented briefly with changing their membership plans from flat-rate to hourly usage, and never really stopped hemorrhaging memberships even when they switched back. When the Internet did appear, Prodigy provided WWW access through its own software, which sucked, but you couldn’t use another browser or communicate with a non-Internet Prodigy member. We left around this time, joining our first true ISP and embracing Netscape Navigator.

Truly Internet-enabled, I began to explore the world online and discovered that although it contained many people, most of the best-looking content came from commercial sources seeking to profit by their websites. This scenario is what started me writing this essay. From the beginning we users envisioned an Internet on which profit-based entities would be also-rans, unable to shift gears and adapt fast enough to stay current with what the cool kids were doing. Emoticons and BBS lingo (sorry kids, you didn’t invent LOL for texting; we came up with that on CompuServe and Prodigy) were cool precisely because you COULDN’T get them on a Tshirt–no business was savvy enough to recognize them as a cultural trend. Sure, the companies who paid geeks like us to make good websites for them produced really fancy content that individual users couldn’t compete with, but since the developers were straitjacketed in their activity by what some last-generation hack in the marketing department thought was good strategy, they weren’t infringing too much on the little guys’ creative territory. An animated GIF logo was impressive, yes, but it was the joke email (or ASCII art) that got circulated around the office and immortalized by distribution.

This didn’t last. Eventually businesses saw the point of really focusing their attention on the Internet, and began not only investing in it, they started hiring Internet users to come up with the IDEAS instead of just porting the ads from other media to a website. Some discovered that the Internet was a feasible medium for direct commerce; Gateway stands out in my mind as an early example of what e-business would become. As soon as that concept was accepted, the Internet changed. There was a huge commercialization wave; soon it became tricky to sift through my Dogpile webcrawler results to find content that wasn’t just there to sell me something.

Then an extraordinary thing happened: It folded in on itself. The very commercialization that was beginning to taint the content…started to change the way it interacted with user-generated content. Ebay provided an e-commerce platform to anyone, not just businesses. YouTube offered a clearinghouse for videos that previously found themselves shackled to bandwidth-limited personal homepages. Flickr allowed photos that previously only moved outward from the source to become searchable content that flowed inward toward the user. Napster, KaZaA, and others changed music back into something that was shared, a notion that was in danger as tape decks were replaced by CD players but CD burning was not yet convenient and easy. Yes, there was piracy, but it was, then as now, mostly a result of enthusiasm for content that was not being made available in the smartest way possible by the companies who wanted to control it. The Internet really looked like it was going to turn into a massive cultural exchange, free from greed-based restrictions.

This didn’t last. As new ways of accessing content became available, businesses who wanted to profit from it tried to regain control. Often the first response was to sue everybody they could identify who was involved in popularizing their stuff among audiences they themselves didn’t know how to reach. After a while, this became less popular (except among the MPAA, who remain, as ever, doggedly ten years behind the rest of the world) and was replaced by the practice of hiring younger geeks to help them use these channels for profit. Steam, iTunes, and Netflix took the place of the pirate websites as the most reliable way to get high-quality content. As usual, the convenience of allowing a business to collect things for you to buy has been spoiled somewhat by the huge limitations that a profit motive places on these services. Each of them is easily the most convenient way to get software, music, or movies…as long as they think the item you want is worth selling. Cost-benefit analysis is the silent censorship that ensures piracy will stay alive; people want what they want regardless of whether the business who owns that content wants to sell it.

I’m excited by the possibility that this is an ongoing pendulum effect. I can’t wait to see what the new big thing to get for free will be before companies jump on it and try to own it. My best guesses are video games and television. Television is already in crisis mode; options for viewing programs online are far superior to options available on TV but Hulu, the best online portal for television, is perpetually struggling to keep its participant content providers from yanking everything back into the vaults in a panic. The irony here is that Hulu itself is the hideous mutant offspring of GE, Newscorp, and Disney, and it still can’t seem to hold their confidence. They understand that people want the content to be free, and they even worked out a format in which commercials aren’t too obnoxious. But they panicked, and now it’s all but impossible to find any show on Hulu that has more than five episodes available.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild are two of the best “pro-quality” indie TV projects I’ve seen, and they stand far above almost everything on “real” TV as far as quality. Comedy, certainly, is going independent. College Humor, Funny Or Die, Loading Ready Run, The Escapist, Onion News Network…these are a thousand times funnier than Saturday Night Live has been for decades. In fact, the only thing worth watching on Saturday Night Live now is the stuff from The Lonely Island, another independent group which got adopted as sort of an official relevance engine for the show. I look forward to seeing how commercialized TV programs continue to decay in favor of much better independent work, enabled by improvements and price drops in computer and video equipment.

Steam is the best software I hate right now. It makes so much sense as a video game marketplace concept, and yet I find myself much more impressed with the ten dollar games from unknown developers than with A-list $60 titles like COD:MW2. Straining, I can only think of three big-label games this year that really impressed me: Batman Arkham Asylum, Little Big Planet, and Brutal Legend. Oops, Wikipedia informs me that LBP actually came out last year. I’m pretty aware of what games are on the market, even if I don’t make an effort to play many of them when brand new, but in that same timeframe, I can name at least ten independent games which I enjoy just as much, many of which are free, and most of which are more creative concepts, made possible by not having to sell the idea to a slimy corporate pimp. I don’t see why this trend should change any time soon.

So there it is. My prediction is that we are about to undergo another big swing toward independent content on the Internet, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

Have you notice the same things? Was this post just way too long? Comment and tell me.

Click on the title. I have nothing to add to this.

Double-posting tonight to make up for the week I missed.

Another old friend just popped up on Facebook this week, and hearing from him again was an occasion to rapidly summarize the last several years of my life. In doing so, I realized I’ve come full circle in relation to guitars.

Let’s be clear about something right away–I’m functionally nonmusical. I like it, I sing with the radio, I am the absolute KING of Rock Band 2 (on Medium, anyway), but I don’t have a strong connection to it. When a psychologist or musicologist challenges the audience to “imagine living without music…IF YOU EVEN CAN,” I honestly think I could. I’d miss it, certainly, in the way I wouldn’t want to live in a world without cheese. But if it disappeared (either music or cheese), I would still have a number of other forms of entertainment handy. My mp3 player spends more time loaded with audiobooks than songs, and if I want to unwind and lose myself in an audio realm, I’m more likely to turn to Patrick Stewart, Leo McKern, or Stephen Briggs than the Beatles, Black Sabbath, and the Kinks.

With that in mind, I have to tell you something. Self-important snotbags like Prince (love your music, BTW, I just don’t want to hear your opinions) have the music gaming idea all wrong. He and a few other artists refuse to support Rock Band and Guitar Hero because they think kids should learn to play real instruments instead. This is totally missing the point. The kids who are willing and able to just go learn an instrument always will. These games have no effect on them. What they do accomplish is making people like me, who have tried and failed numerous times to learn an instrument (three years in band and I was terrible) want to give it another shot. Know how to get someone interested in devoting time to practice? Give them a taste of what it feels like to actually do the thing for real. Rock Band makes me feel like a musical genius when I fly through a Tenacious D song by using the Force, because there’s no time to consciously think about where to put my fingers. Suddenly, I have an inkling of what playing guitar must feel like. I’m not an idiot; I know I’m not learning to play real guitar by pressing buttons on a plastic toy. But suddenly I grasp the feeling of making the music myself and I want to learn to do it for real.

An idle remark along these lines prompted a friend to drop off an old Fender acoustic at my house with his encouragement. Having pawned my first guitar, a student-style Applause with a plastic back which nevertheless had a very nice tone (I was told, I mean how would I know?), I picked this battered brown warhorse up with some reluctance. I remembered how long it had taken me to learn what tiny amount of guitar playing I had managed before. I quickly realized that I would need to re-establish all of my fingertip calluses. But after a few days of warily circling it, I managed to pluck out, shakily, the first few bars of Greensleeves. Hell, had I lost this much? At one point I knew Greensleeves well enough to play it onstage during our short run of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). I no longer felt like challenging Jack and Kyle to a duel of axes. I threw the pick back in the case and played quietly, because a novice guitarist sounds like a catfight in a piano.

The good news is that when I first learned to play guitar, there was no such thing as YouTube. Now there are a number of people who are perfectly willing to record themselves giving impromptu guitar lessons and publish the video online for free. I have no idea why they do this, but I am tremendously grateful for them, because I don’t have to apologize for making them show me the same thing 40 times while I struggle to understand it. If I have the self-discipline to keep trying, I think the resources are there for me to actually become a bad guitar player instead of a Rock Band player who owns a guitar. And that would be a real accomplishment.

Hit the comments below to tell me what you think.

Apparently this blog thing is the type of activity that I’m going to have to do every day or I won’t do it at all. I had originally planned to write on weekdays only, but that just led to a week of silence. I’ll try not to let that happen again.

In my defense, I’ve been unusually talkative on Facebook and Twitter lately; in all likelihood some of my musings there could easily have been blog posts. So tonight they get neglected in favor of the thing with my name on it. Take that, internet community!

I got Close Encounters excited tonight (the kind where you know you’re on to something major but no one else cares) while preparing dinner. I was roasting tomatoes on the gas grill, and they were tiny tomatoes, so I had them on a sort of griddle fashioned out of aluminum foil to keep them from squidging down through the grate as they softened. Suddenly I was struck by an epiphany: if I had a larger, sturdier metal sheet, the grill could become the teppanyaki table I’ve always wanted since my first Benihana meal as a kid. Eureka!

Being a fan of Good Eats, I’ve been made to feel inadequate for not using real half-sheet pans instead of the old warped AirBake stuff we got at Publix years ago. I’m now wondering if this is the application that will justify actually buying one (or dare I dream, two). A heavy-duty aluminum slab like that seems like the best option for grill-griddling. There are cast iron griddles made more or less for this exact purpose, but that would be a massive hunk of iron to clean, store, and never use for anything else. Half-sheet pans would do not only this, but replace about 3 currently-owned baking sheets. Maybe 5.

Has anyone out there tried this, or seen it done? I’d like to hear your opinion.