Video blogs, floaty pens.

I've always been a little annoyed by internet video. The buffering wait times bring to mind the 56 kpbs download days, where you'd sit there and watch an image on your screen inchworm itself into existence while your blood pressure ticked up a notch. I vowed I'd stay away from this so-called innovation as a blogger, but then these darned fancy little Flip cameras came along, and here I am thinking about doing some videocasting about typewriters and pens and whatnot. Because you can only take so many videos of your kid.

Trying to brainstorm topics... Stalking typewriters at thrift stores? Live pen comparison tests?

***a few hours later***

Ok, not exactly Wim Wenders here, and not even a Flip camera (rather, an old Canon Elph) but here is some poorly executed stalker footage I took of the many dozens of typewriters that line the shelves of Island Books on Mercer Island, Washington. The typewriters line many walls of the store, this is just one section. They are all on the top of a very high bookshelf, thus, I had to hold the camera aloft, surely looking insane in the process. Luckily, only the bookseller was present at the time, since it was right after the place opened on a glum, post-Christmas Sunday.

I will try in earnest to supply superior footage to this in future filming attempts.

Moving on to floaty pens.

There is a floaty pen blogger out there. Check it out. Thus far I have learned that quality varies in the floaty pen world, and that one would do best to focus on those made by the Eskesen company, which explains floating action technology on its Web site.

***update***

I remembered that a friend of mine and my husband's had once been in the habit of gifting my husband with floaty pens. Thus, I banished him to the attic on a 30 degree night to rummage in boxes of old office supplies until he descended, covered in spiders and fiberglass wisps, with a bundle of pens in his hand. May I also mention that he rolled his eyes.

Click the photos for a closer look, although getting a good shot of floaty pens isn't the easiest trick in the amateur scanner's handbook.

Keitai shosetsu, fake Christmas trees.

You know those Christmas specials that you watch on the tube every holiday season, the one with the stop motion reindeer, for example, and the Charlie Brown and Grinch classics, and all that? Well, I may have failed to mention my own humble contribution to the form, scribbled on a piece of paper several bored Christmases ago. I like to re-run it on the site annually, in place of actual content updates, in the same spirit as the Christmas specials themselves.

Unrelatedly, cell phone fiction is here. All you Nanowrimists are already familiar with the form, to some extent: speed-written, no looking back. Well, flex your thumbs, because you may be texting your next 30-day literary masterwork in November 2009. All the rage in Japan for some time (even making their way to print, and bestseller status), the cell phone novel may well be the future of fiction, as the once mighty publishing houses collapse upon themselves like the Kingdome in 2000. Can't wait until November to secure your place on the bandwagon? Make haste to Textnovel at once, and commence thumbing in service of literary evolution.

Is this a challenge? Perhaps eventually, when I upgrade to a cell phone that does something more high-tech than dropping calls.

Snowpocalypse

Well, I would have updated earlier today, but according to Seattle weather forecasters, I was shoveling my house out from neck-deep snow all afternoon. Except that I wasn't. Yes, that's right, every school district in a 50 mile radius closed shop for a cloud day.

So, I guess I have no excuse. Rats. However, I did have time to read this Slate article about the demise of print media, which includes the following body count of technologies and/or industries felled by the digital age:

• Bank tellers
• Typewriters
• Typesetting
• Carburetors
• Vacuum tubes
• Slide rules
• Disc jockeys
• Stockbrokers
• Telephone operators
• Yellow pages
• Repair guys
• Bookbinders
• Pimps (displaced by the cell phone and the Web)
• Cassette and reel-to-reel recorders
• VCRs
• Turntables
• Video stores
• Record stores
• Bookstores
• Recording industry
• Courier/messenger services
• Travel agencies
• Print and cinematic porn
• Porn actors
• Stenographers
• Wired telcos
• Drummers
• Toll collectors (slayed by the E-ZPass)
• Book publishing (especially reference works)
• Conventional-watch makers
• "Browse" shopping
• U.S. Postal Service
• Printing-press makers
• Film cameras
• Kodak (and other film-stock makers)

(Great, there goes one of my unwritten Strikethru rules, which is to never offer the possibility of "porn" ending up as a search term on the site). I'm kind of wanting to play Amazing Grace on the bagpipes after reading through this list. Are there any line items you dispute? (I'm stratching my head over "repair guys," myself. And *someone* is posing for all that internet porn). Are there any they left out?

Abandoned SFO

A pal of mine posted a link in Facebook to Abandoned SFO, a terminal at San Francisco International Airport that was closed to the public in 2002. Sad, and lovely.

The photographer, Troy Paiva, also runs the site Lost America.

Obituary in print

I've usually got both of them open in the mornings, the mildly grimy, 3 year old Apple powerbook covered with faded Elmo stickers, alongside a section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (although I quit coffee a few years back).

Publishing 2.0 is a fascinating read, in addition to the New York Times article linked to from the front page of the Publishing 2.0 site, Content and its Discontents (go on, register for the NYT online, worth it). The article is about how the revolution in content delivery will necessitate a change to content itself:

"All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists."

Quite a sweeping statement.

Did I mention that the first half of this post was brought to you by a Gold Fibre antique ivory writing pad and a USA General 931T pencil?

A vexing question for the typecasting hive mind

Actually I had my vexing question answered. Leaving only the clown.