Thursday, April 23, 2009

YouTube Mosaic Music Video - Dennis Liu

Been meaning to post this for days - many of you have hopefully already seen this, it's a uniquely interactive music video that I would describe as a gloriously meta explosion of the Internet onto itself. I am lucky enough to know the director Dennis Liu, and got a chance to see an earlier version, minus the billion annotations (which is a big part of the fun, be sure to play around with it). What you're about to see is assuredly the end product of an indescribable amount of work, but I'm sure you'll agree the creative results were well worth it.

Judging from his ability as a movie director, one can only imagine how great a corporate attorney, investment banker, or medical doctor Dennis would have made. While it is surely a massive shame that he has not pursued those obviously more worthy life paths, it is not a complete loss. At least there is this video. Enjoy!


Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Dinosaurs and Outer Space

I met a friend of a friend recently who wearing an outer-space themed shirt. Not like some trendy design or some hipster joke shirt - more like the kind of shirt you would find at the gift shop at an observatory. The picture here is more “gift-shoppy” (read: ridiculous) than the shirt he was wearing, but I think the picture is instructive just so we all roughly know what I am talking about.

Ultimately, this guy was making a conscious decision. He was silently saying, “I like outer space, and I don’t care if this is a socially marginalizing choice, what I care about is that the solar system is awesome.” Because it really is a socially marginalizing choice. Wearing an outer space themed shirt, or a similar museum-gift-shop dinosaur shirt in your everyday life effectively cuts you off from tons of social circles. If you're going to rock shirts like this, it's a wrap for you on having sex with anyone who doesn't also wear these shirts.

Upon further reflection, I think this is rather unfortunate. I’ve been to a couple natural history museums with friends recently, and everyone is psyched to check out the dinosaur exhibits. And excluding the reputational damage from the time Lance Bass almost went into space, space travel still seems pretty sweet to most people I know. But although I still think space travel and dinosaurs are sweet, I’ve long since passed the age where it’s acceptable to be truly enthusiastic about such things, or enthusiastic enough to wear t-shirts like the one my friend’s friend wore. It’s been so long that my actual enthusiasm has diminished, and I presumably will never recover that. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have soaked it in a little more. If I could live life over again, I would definitely make sure I saw “Jurassic Park” in theaters instead of watching it three years later on NBC.

Regrets, I’ve had a few.