I mean today. How I woke up today. I suppose you could make something more of it. If you wanted to. I guess.

In 1981 I bought my first computer. It wasn't much. No hard drive, no modem, about 6 bytes of RAM. But after putting it together and getting it to do something, anything, I sat back and went hmmm. This is the all-purpose machine. You can write on it, make pictures, make music, communicate (if you get a modem one day). Damn.

It was sort of a science fiction fantasy at that point. Wow, I'm tripping, I thought.

In 1995 I was in a meeting with Vint Cerf and his development team at MCI's Washington DC headquarters. Vint is the guy who co-invented TCP/IP, which is what hangs the interwebs together. He's at Google now. He was asking me something about marketing. He was asking me. Damn.

I walked out of that meeting thinking, as close as I am to all this, I have a feeling none of us has the foggiest clue of what's coming. I'm tripping, I thought. It was a science fiction flash of something huge. So big there was no one to tell. I mean, who would get it?

Lately I've been discouraged by most of what I see on the net. So much promise, but the bad guys have won again. Shit.

But maybe it's like that Journey to the East thing. Maybe it was happening all along. You know? And I just wasn't picking up.

I got pretty turned on yesterday by that Bomb-It movie I told you about. Did you click through on that killer poster? Did you watch the trailer where the chick says: "This is the biggest art movement in the history of humankind"?

So this morning -- I still haven't even made coffee -- I went to a whole nother place. Wanna come? Wanna see? Got an hour?

I started out at Art Crimes, a site I used to visit in another life. And from there I linked over to Robots Will Kill, where I found this monster mix by Udachi.

DO THIS NOW: start it up.

Give it a minute. Get past Greg and the fax machine. LOL. Give it total immersion. Let it have your whitebread ass. You been livin in the burbs too long. I have, anyway. Fuckin Boulder. You stick with it, you'll see what I mean.

Now check out Concrete Alchemy...

Then start up this Concrete Alchemy Pool show.

OK, well, this was a short post, but you're not done yet. Rock on and see what science fiction feels like when it slams straight into you from a future you never dreamed of.

That's a quote from An Interface of One's Own by one Virginia Heffernan. Her essay on non-Microsoft-Word word processors (primarily Mac) ran in the New York Times on January 6 of this year. I produced the graphic by taking a Snapz Pro X screenshot of her words as rendered in WriteRoom, the software she's talking about in that passage. She also has good things to say about Scrivener and CopyWrite. I own every one, all licensed and legal-like. Now, to paraphrase Jimi...

“I focus on the positive. I like to keep things lighthearted.”

~Melissa C. Morris, whose blog is the focus of an article in today's
New York Times: When Old Money Marries New Media.

In a June 11 post, Out and About - American Theatre Wing's spring gala, we are informed that the event was held at Cipriani. And oh do click that link! Among the many pictures from the evening is this one, captioned: "Literary dynamic duo Dana Vachon and Phoebe Eaton." If you think Mr. Vachon looks a tad vampiric in this shot, try clicking on it for the full-bore Transylvania effect on Melissa's site.

click

June 16 addendum: they published it. bwahahahahaha!

From yesterday's story in The Guardian: Bush voices regret for macho rhetoric in run-up to Iraq war.

“...George Bush has expressed regret that his rhetoric in
the run-up to the war in Iraq may have created the impression that
he was a warmonger.”

You think?