Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 19-28)

Road Trip

For the first time in a long time I went on a road trip the other day.

I've lived in France for nearly 5 years now, but I've spent most of that time not seeing anything more than classrooms and my bedroom. It's easy to get caught up in the monotony of waiting things out. Doing what you're supposed to be doing just to get by.

Watching clocks tick as you forget why you ever started waiting in the first place.

So this adventure was an interesting mix of my reluctance to do anything and a fun chance to see the beautiful country I live in. There's a lot of countryside to see and it's amazing how you can drive for a half hour and run into a castle without trying.

I've become so used to all that that a part of me has forgotten how amazing it really is.

It also gave me a fun chance to record a trip in stop motion. But not just in stop motion. I had a vague idea as the day went on of capturing the monotony of driving mixed in with those fleeting memories of doing something.

Traffic Lights

It's amazing how much a single stroke of luck can increase traffic to your website. I had it happen once here many years ago when Ramit Sethi tweeted out one of my posts.

The post that he tweeted out was a simple thing I wrote in about five minutes.

I only bring it up because something similar happened very recently over on Medium in regards to what Comatose writes. We spend a decent amount of time preparing written pieces every week. It's a collaborative effort and there's a wide variety of voices, and the posts even boosted by being published on The Coffeelicious, a popular Medium community.

However, last week I also made a quick comment on a top article on Medium. It took me at most 30 seconds to write and it now has more views than everything else we've published combined.

That big spike there is the comment I'm talking about.

What's more, even though that comment is getting thousands of views, practically no one who sees it clicks through to see any of our other work.

I'd noticed a similar thing happen where it seems most of the people who read our posts do not actually listen to the episode it's (sometimes loosely) tied to. That makes sense though, I imagine people on Medium want to consume more written media than audio.

It's interesting to see it actually happen with numbers though! I don't know if it's safe to say there's an easy way to catch people's attention, but I may have to experiment with the idea a bit more in the coming weeks.

When You Sleep

 

I've been having a lot of issues with my internet and have been monitoring it a lot more lately to try and figure out what's wrong with it.

And interesting thing that comes with all this bandwidth usage data is you can tell when everyone's asleep by the dramatic end in nearly all use of the internet.

 Still haven't really figured out the problem, and I'm dreading having to talk to my internet provider, but this little bit of fun gave me a smile.

All Hail The Stream

 

I’ve become a bit obsessed with Twitch over the past month or so. It’s an incredibly interesting new medium and the way communication works on Twitch is just… so very interesting.

Twitch is a livestreaming service focusing on gaming, but not really limited to gaming. Its scope as a way to build a community and find friends goes way beyond gaming.

Being a fan of Twitch is one part the streamer and one part the chat. Or maybe that should be The Chat. It’s not like a normal chat room, it’s more like being in the stands at a football game. A bunch of people shouting, cheering, and jeering.

It can get a bit chaotic.

Screenshot from Sjru.

But that’s a part of the fun.

What I find the most interesting is the relationships that are then built around all this. Similar to other forms of media, the relationships tend to be one sided. The Chat adores the streamer and feels like they’re a friend, but to the streamer The Chat is largely just anonymous strangers.
Streamers often interact with the chat giving a deeper connection with those in the chat, but at the end of the day it’s still one sided. There’s no real way to know if the streamer has read what you wrote, or even cares.

On top of that there isn’t much intra-community chat in the chat itself. Most of the chat is trying to talk to the streamer and it’s much rarer that people talk amongst themselves.

That’s made me start wondering what kind of effect that can have on a person.

A voyeurism dripping in anonymous internet culture.

It bleeds a certain desperation. At least in between the laughs and escape I get from it, I can feel that it’s feeding the lack of human connection that is a bit too common in my life at the moment. How common is that feeling?

And maybe more importantly, how many streamers are aware of how important they are to The Chat?

Time Lapse or The Illusion of Time

Right before I left the states again about a month ago, my Mom bought be a GoPro because I had made vague references to wanting one and because she wanted to make me happy before I left town again.

After my initial post-buying guilt, I let myself think of how I wanted to use the camera. I liked the idea of it being useful as both a “picture camera” and a “movie camera” but also grossly underestimated how cool it is a time machine with its time lapse feature.

The first thing I thought I’d capture was our flight. It was hard figuring out where exactly I could put the camera, but ended up finding a good enough spot. It turned off a few times throughout the flight, and the shot isn’t the best, but it is interesting.

You can see how fast time passes when hours turn into seconds.

That led me to then recording the train ride from Paris to Tours.

And I’ve since been finding more and more things that I can film in time lapse. Some of them turn out pretty cool.

Others not so much.

It does make me excited to see what else I could film. I love playing with time and seeing things in a completely new perspective, but I’m not always sure how to film what I want to see. I’m sure if I stay at it I’ll get better and develop a better eye for it.

But for right now, it remains just out of grasp. Something mesmorizing but beyond my reach.

Time will tell how it plays out.

Anxiety

I touched on some of the struggles I've been having with this whole existence thing as of late in my latest piece for The Coffeelicious, Xanga Poetry.

What I loved about it more than that though was how all the struggles I wrote about nicely tied into each of the segments on that episode. I hadn't really planned for that to happen, but after it did, I couldn't imagine it any other way.

I bring it up because while my small opening up may seem sad, Inda Lauryn's segment brought me to tears with how strong it was. I think the music just added something so heavy to the whole thing and I love how it turned out.

Take a listen if not just to hear her segment.