http://shootthebanker.com/

Shoot the banker is a website where, among one other thing, you shoot a banker. The other thing is calling up the banker and complaining to him about the economic mess he’s gotten us into. But this banker doesn’t take live ammunition to the chest, opting instead for pink paintballs in lieu of 9mm rounds. An herein lies the best part of the whole thing, you control the gun. A live stream from a webcam is broadcast of the target (the banker), while those in line wait their turn for 10 seconds and 2 paintballs. The banker must swerve and dodge the never ending onslaught of angry peasant-folk’s paintballs, all the while dishing out insults to hapless callers that are either in over their head, or underage.

Here’s a perfect example:

I’m sure things like this have been created before somewhere out there on the vast tubes of the internet, but this is fairly creative, given the premise of the project. The only trouble is that irony exists, and the people at shoot the banker can’t afford to keep it running. Turns out the very machine they rage against, in the end, got them too. This is only their third week in operation, and they claim they are $10,000 “in the hole” from the resources devoted to keeping something like this running. So by the banker’s estimates, this will also be their last week in business. So if you’ve got an axe to grind with any of the world’s bankers that swindled you out of your retirement all in one fell swoop, you’ve got just a few days left to take that aggression out on an honest to goodness (sort of) banker.

All in all, it’s a pretty impressive feat for a few hobbyists. Creating both the gun rig, and the program to control the interface from scratch. But sadly, like they say, all good things must come to an end. So kudos to they guys behind this little gem, the internet would be a better place if its inhabitants were as creative as you guys.

They’ve even got their own fan site(s)!

Check it out, the banker is in from 9 – 5 Mountain time (he really does this for eight hours straight), and sometimes the janitors are in afterward, followed by late night with Taran and Brig (the creators of the show).

A cruel misuse of the word retrospective, perhaps, to only cover a meager four months. However, in the span of a typical college semester, I believe the term is not only applicable, but stunningly pertinent as well. I speak not specifically about blogging in these terms, but for what we learn in any given semester in school, or even any given length of time equal to that of a semester.

Colleges, by design, seem to have this down to an art, science even. To cram in as much material in as short a time as possible. But then again, this is their meaning, despite vague and often times misleading mission and vision statements. Colleges as institutions do what they have to, it is up to us, the students, to make of it what we can.

Blogging seems to be an allegory for college. We begin with the basic tools we need to start off. Knowing how to read and write, etc. But each new tool we find at our disposal could be likened to a new semester, a new course in college. What we make of those courses is like to what extent we use this new media. Do we simply glaze over the subject, squeaking by or do we delve into the subject, trying to absorb all the information we can?

The more specialized we become on one field of study, the less we then know, or have the capacity to understand, about any other given subject. Such is life though. For the time being however, and while we share our experience in college, I think it is prudent to try and learn as much as we can. That is to say, participate in what we are presented with, to not superficially engage in our classes.

So when blogging, we could superficially engage in the act. We could simply write, and while this might be sufficient for glazing over a subject (one we might be writing about), it really only scratches the surface of what is available to us. But if we were to begin to add the proverbial intelligence to our writing, it starts to become something more. The same could then be said about our schooling. While some of us, if not most, are at times content to led a class slide, claiming irrelevance, I believe there is a purpose to every challenge we are confronted with over the years.

Remember, colleges and universities have been doing this, in this country since before we were a country, and earlier still in other parts of the world. It’s a refined art. We can smile or cringe at our prospects. I, for one, look forward to the new experiences, and challenge myself to try and grasp the concepts that I am shown. (I pay too much not too!)

We get what we want out of blogging, school, work,  life.

I have no definitive conclusion here. No last thoughts that tie all this in together. My experiences continue, as does everyone else’s. Life is an open book, which could close on us at any given time. What choice does that leave us other than to seize the day? Hardly any in my mind.

But likely so, there was little choice in my mind other than to write, when given the task. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to miss the chance to create while I still can. Because in the end, we only get one thing: a hyphen between two numbers.

Who cares?

It’s all

LOL INTERNET

anyway.

I can’t talk about Twitter without talking about WordPress. Well, I should say blogging, both in the noun and verb forms of the word.

Blogs and blogging mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As opposed to Twitter, blogs are extremely versatile, and there are a multitude of blog hosting websites out there each offering their own unique twist on blogging. The blog design itself can say a lot about the person writing it or the writing itself without even reading it. Designs are nice and all, and there certianly is a lot to be said about the design aspect of blogs, this is not where I will dwell.

Instead I’d like to examine the act of blogging itself. Well what is blogging? Blogging is typing words on the internet. That’s it. And I don’t really want to get into the whole philosophy of writing words, be it for therapeutic, capital, or really any means. For arguments sake, let’s assume that there are words being typed. Most of the time, people are going to have an idea of what they want to write, that is to say, they aren’t writing random words.

But let’s say they don’t know what to write? And let’s qualify that by saying they have to write. We’re stumped, what can we do? Here are some things I’ve found helpful when coming up with things to write about.

First, like any other social site out there on the internet, this is a chance to project yourself. For better or for worse, you are being given a stage to stand on, and an audience the size of the world. And that is a pretty powerful image to take in. For free you can broadcast yourself however you like. This is probably part of the therapeutic part social media. We can project ourselves how we would like ourselves to be seen, and blogging is a chance to do just that, in a very versatile way. All the images and words in the world are at your disposal. So project yourself and don’t be shy. Besides, you’re behind a computer, no one will know!

Second, I like to look at it in terms of chronicling something, namely your life. Remember when you signed up for your blog? Remember what name you put down in that form? Unless you’re into using a pseudonym, you probably put down your name. Well there’s only one YOU in the world. So write something about YOU! No one else in the entire world knows what you know, so why don’t you be so kind as to let us in on your thoughts? Blogs are a good way to get some of your thoughts and emotions out. Nothing you write about your life can ever be replicated, put your own personal spin on mundane things. Dear reader, this is YOUR life!

Third, a lot of what I write is my own inner dialogue. This along with what happens in my life is the basis for most of my posts. And this is something that almost everyone can write about. Even if you have a mostly mundane life, have a conversation about just that, monotony and come to a conclusion about it. Talk about it as though people were reading it, because people will read it. And as long as you’re not brain dead, there should be an inner dialogue with yourself. This is all good stuff. Just compile those thoughts into a readable, digestable format, and you’re golden!

There is no right or wrong way to write about you, or what you’re interested in. Even if you just want to write train of thought, at least you’re writing something. More often than not, by the time you are done writing, there is a good idea which you can build off of.

Take the weight off youself. Blogging is not difficult. Remember, it’s only writing words. Anyone in college is capable of writing words. Don’t underestimate yourself, don’t be shy, put yourself out there. These are all things every one of us is going to have to do in some capacity in the professional world anyway, might as well get a head start, or at least practice here and now.

Now that some time has passed since being introduced to this thing called Twitter, and writing my post about the social network sites I use, it’s high time to revisit this particular site.

Today in dlangendorf‘s class, we had a round robin discussion about Twitter, among some other sites and ideas. When talking about social networks and social media, particularly about websites (though we might as well lump in any form of electronic social media), the focus shouldn’t be on trying to define what it is we’re dealing about exactly.That’s already been done for us. For example, what is Twitter? Yes, we could all give a pretty dry and strict definition of what the sum of its parts are. Beyond that however the question lies: what does the sum of all those parts really mean?

Most of us probably grasp the nature of the beast that is Twitter, it’s actually pretty simple compared to many other social networking sites. But this is where I think the real issue lies, how do we go about taming this beast. How do we harness the inherent power in sites such as Twitter? Some users are content to have their few followers surround them, and that’s perfectly fine. While on the other end of the spectrum we have the people who, like the people on MySpace who have tens of thousands of friends, have thousands and thousands of followers who religiously read their tweets. Of course we can’t forget all the people who fit into the spaces in between either end of the spectrum.

But that’s all pretty obvious. Like any other social media site, Twitter is a place for self-expression. A place to expunge our daily emotions, via headline length updates. This works wonderfully for me, and it’s mostly what I use Twitter for. Depending on the individual, Twitter is also a place for self-promotion, or just promotion in general. But unlike ads on websites, on Twitter you the reader have to want to be exposed to advertisements. This is something that I believe is unique to Twitter.

Pick any other site, preferably social media related, though it doesn’t have to be. If you want to consume what that site has to offer, you generally are accepting the fact that advertisements will come with the territory. You don’t have a choice (unless you have ad block or whatever, you people don’t count). So for the time being, Twitter is ad free, unless you want it. And that’s because Twitter is just one big advertisement. For yourself, for your friends, for companies, for whatever. Here’s the bottom line, every time you update on Twitter, you are advertising yourself.

Advertising here doesn’t necessarily mean the traditional paradigm of gotta spend money to make money, but we nevertheless are putting ourselves out there, on the world’s stage to be judged by the masses. We are advertising to the people that we have something to say, and that people should listen to what we have to say, otherwise we wouldn’t be on there, updating. The character limit almost forces us into this mold. In order to clearly make our points we have to link to elsewhere in the tubes for further reading, watching, listening, what have you. If all we were allowed to post were links, it would probably be the most pure form of social media, because that’s all we would be doing. Exchanging information, being social.

But there is definitely more to it than that. A lot of people seem to liken it to status updates on other social sites. I wouldn’t be so quick to make that comparison myself. On those other sites, you can update your status, like on Twitter, you can fill out a line about what you’re doing. However, unlike those other sites, Twitter doesn’t just write over your previous update with the new one. It keeps them all in your history. It’s much more conversational than a simple status update. Which is probably part of the draw that people feel about it. Yes it does feel very gossipy, and who doesn’t like gossip?

I like to throw things at my Twitter-wall, and see what sticks, and then what people pick off that wall. It has a social experiment feel to it, which I think is something that is missing from some of the other big sites out there. They are so predictable, that’s it’s difficult to get too excited about them. I know if I click on someone I’m going to get roughly the same experience, just with a different face attached to it.

In the end, Twitter is a fun place to have a quick read about your favorite people, granted they’re on Twitter. As with many other sites, a lot of big names are on there too, and it’s interesting to read what they have to say, since it feels a lot more transparent that other sites. It feels like there really is a person on the other end talking to you, and not just trying to sell you something, again very conversational. Heck, you can even make your house plant a Twitter account, and converse with them!

Give it a try, like it or don’t it’s worth a shot.

Every once in a while I’ll Google my user name just to see what’s out there about me. The usual always comes up, the few sites that I keep up with and upkeep myself. But at some point in the past few months, something new began to appear when I searched for SuperJanitor. It was this graphic design chop shop of a website, where anything and everything under the sun is printed on just about anything you could ever want. I was kind of surprised, as SuperJanitor probably isn’t something that would come up in normal conversation, it’s pretty high concept I think. But nevertheless, staring me in the face was a multitude of SuperJanitor merchandise, and I had nothing to do with it. Or did I?

I am convinced that this was not an original idea of whoever came up with the design of that SuperJanitor logo, but stolen. Stolen from someone like me. Of course this is all wild speculation, but I have records of me using SuperJanitor as far back as 2001. It seems to me that someone out there on the tubes decided they liked the idea of SuperJanitor, went ahead and made a logo, and sold it to the aforementioned chop shop. But this post isn’t about me pondering my intellectual property rights (and possible royalty rights!) to something I neither coined nor was the first to use in a sentence (even though I sure as heck corner the market on the internet as far as SuperJanitor goes, links from chop shop notwithstanding). This post is about me being able to legitimately post a picture of a thong.

Ladies, make sure to get yourself a super sexy SuperJanitor thong. Men, I’ve heard man-thongs are quite comfortable, so pick one up yourselves. This is of course only one example of a plethora of wardrobe items available to you, so why not choose a few, maybe one for each day of the week. You can’t go wrong with SuperJanitor.

It’s too bad I don’t get a slice of whatever money they’re making off selling this stuff. I can’t imagine it’s too much though.

It’s a blogroll. I had never heard the word until I began my computer mediated communications class in school, and created this blog. But what is a blogroll? Apparently all it is, is a part of any given blog that lists, get this, other blogs. Of course this list is not limited to just blogs, but anything the creator finds interesting enough to add it to their blog. Generally the blogroll consists of items that are related to the subject matter being discussed on the blog they appear on. So the interests of both the readers and the creator are shared between these sites, and thus [social] networking is born. Aren’t the internets grand?

I never really read a whole lot of blogs in my time, instead gravitating toward the forum type internet standard. It just seemed to me that there was more information to digest at any given time, as well as having the ability to have a conversation in real time with some of the other forum goers. But I suppose a blog could fit in this category. The difference being the weight of the first post, the actual blog post. The content therein is generally more well thought out, sometimes incorporating multimedia, and almost always having something to say. Blogs are not the time waster a lot of forums are, at least in my eyes.

Here are some of my most frequented bloggish type websites on the tubes: Read the rest of this entry »

Ask an uninformed goon such as myself, and I’d tell you that the idea of socially networking people was probably best left to the sociologists. Other than calling hard line telephone networks, electrical grids, and modern plumbing being socially networked, a decade ago we didn’t really think in the terms that we do today of people being networked socially, and certainly not via the internets. So over the past few years, these social networking websites have literally changed the way people interact with each other on a fundamental level. For those of us who use and abuse these sites, they are a godsend, while to others these sites remain the bane of their internet existence. In this post, I pick my poison. Read the rest of this entry »

We as a society have been ordering food for the better part of the last century, and continue today. “Take out” has a certain social stigma attached to it, good or bad, it’s part of our culture. So the idea of ordering food to go, or to pick up at a predetermined time is something we would consider normal. And why not? After all, we’ve all done it, probably countless times at that. Something though that most of us didn’t necessarily see coming was the new ways which we go about collecting our food. Most of the time we would either call ahead and place the order, and go pick it up, or have it delivered to us. But all this was about to change. The take out food industry was about to experience something revolutionary, it was about to experience the internet! Read the rest of this entry »