First, shout-out to Zach's cronies at the internet-uber-ubiq Google. I have just stepped into the year 2003 and started using a reader to check out the web. You should, too, only for self entertainment purposes, let's always call it Google Readah from now on. (A reader, for the uninitiated, is a utility by which you can subscribe to site feeds. The site feeds will send you links when sites are updated. This way you can just check your reader instead of going site to site. Nifty, eh?). Anyhoo, my reader has subscriptions to a bunch of blogs, news sites, web dork sites and such. I just finished a stupidly long blog post of my own that got vastly over-serious in a short amount of time, so I decided to launch on a little web venture and see where things may go. Come along.
First, Boing Boing points me to a crazy little art installation in San Jose. Check it:
That's an installation atop an Adobe building in San jose entitled "San Jose Semaphore." Those four discs rotate and, along with a recordd radio message simulcast on the web, encode a message. The message is, of course, crazy-encrypted - a challenge was put out to the engineering minded San Jose community to figure out what the installment was shouting forth. After nearly a year, two guys figured it out. And this is a slew of heady reading, but the process they used was pretty fascinating - read this to hear how the artist encoded it, and then read this to learn how the two dudes decoded it. (Note - I predict that none of you will actually read them in detail, as it is pretty involved. I can't decide whether it is really that cryptic - ha - or it's just written by engineers. To save you some trouble, the semaphore encodes The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Pretty Sweet).
That little trip took me over to the Adobe website, where I found this list of recent award winners for animation / graphic design. Lots of cool stuff there, even if it's pretty much a plug for Adobe products.
After that, my Readah took me to this comic strip called the Laugh Out Loud Cats. It's very weird and has this crazy invented backstory about how the artist's grandfather was a Depression-era cartoonists and he is now republishing his granddad's efforts. You'll quickly figure out that this isn't really true; the strips contain all sorts of modern references and, in general, a very odd manner of grammar / spelling. Laugh-Out Loud = LOL, and this is really a reference ot LOLcats. Seems there is a wacky internet phenomenon going on out there where people throw up pictures like this:
There is really no good original way to explain this phenomenon; the best thing is probably just to head over to I Can Has Cheeseburger and look at a ton of wacky captioned cat pictures to get a feel for what is going on. It's all a sly parody on something called leetspeak aka "l33tsp33k", a form of IMing or in-game messaging that computer gurus use to convey information faster or really, in a coolguy vernacular. So the oldstyle cartoon is a '20s style cartoon rendering of those same cat images, only with ink-drawings in place of the usual cute kitten photos. I am having trouble deciding whether all of this is awesome, a sign of the vibrant acceleration of cultural evolution, of further proof that with all this freedom we essentially accomplish nothing. Except funny cat pics. ANyways, I really liked this one on the game Go, thoguh I originally didn't get it:
Apparently, a standard form of these LOLCat captions is "I'm in ur X, Ying ur Z." This is thought to have its origins in the Red Alert online game, where you could blow up your opponents bases with troops that your opponent, had he not sent his scout to check, would not be able to see (so the exchange would go "Where the hell are you?""I'm in your base, melting your guns"). Which is not in and of itself cool. But it leads to the concept of snowclones, or stock phrase-forms derived from popular origins. Think "if I had a ____ for every ____, I'd be a _____." Structural joke and language forms have some pretty weird beginnings, and it's hard to speak originally when everything under the sun has been... I mean, there is nothing I can say that I... crap.
So, I've managed to bore even myself with this web-trip - so I'll leave you with this, a website called Aurgasm where you can check out rando indie peeps from some dude in Boston you'll likely never meet. Enjoy.
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