Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

No, no, so sorry: I don’t love it

Quite good, this ad — via IF! from PSFK, a pointer to the Marmite campaign (”you either love it or hate it”), and that Marmite started a Facebook group. So far, it has almost 1400 fans…

Updates

I spend too much time on a local forum, where I post many items, and I spend quite a bit of time on Facebook, to which I also post interesting items I come across. Between those two opportunities, plus the minimally paid work (writing) I do, I find that my poor blog is being neglected.

Well, here’s the deal: until I get around to writing longer posts here, I’m going to use my diigo account to blog the same items I post to my other digital playgrounds. That way, the old place will at least have some semblance of life!

Red Fish Blue Fish

It’s a holiday today in British Columbia, and I managed to take full advantage of the fact (well, aside from doing the usual Monday laundry-loads , food-preps, dog-walks, and other normal family life stuff…). But around mid-day all five of us (that’s counting the dog) walked over to Red Fish Blue Fish to have lunch.

The food was really delicious (a scallop sandwich to die for, for example), and the only drawback was that the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority has forbidden Red Fish Blue Fish to set up any tables or chairs on the pier. So we parked ourselves on the pier’s edge, which wasn’t quite as comfy as sitting at a proper table. The irony is that “safety issues” are Harbour Authority’s excuse for not allowing table set-up — perhaps they feel the tables might be wobbly on the old pier? Whatever the reason, “safety issues” is a hilarious objection since perching on the edge of the pier is risky. You could topple over the edge and land 15 feet below on some gangway (if you’re lucky) or fall right into the harbour waters (if you’re outta luck), or you could get some serious splinters in your bum from the old wood (if you just want to be sublimely distressed). (Did I mention that the pier is old?)

Speaking of sublime, do take a look at the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority front page — they have an impressive banner photo (currently, anyway) that shows Ogden Point with two docked cruise ships, and part of downtown to the north, past the trees of James Bay, the residential neighbourhood between downtown and Ogdon Point.

I uploaded photos of Red Fish Blue Fish’s facility to my Facebook account, which you can view if you have an account. Their idea isn’t new, but it’s great nonetheless: the entire operation is housed in a converted shipping container, which the partners creatively remodeled into a charming piece of ex-industrial humdrum hunk-of-steel qua architectural trendiness. They planted the roof with drought-resistant plants (sedums and grasses — typically, our summers are extremely dry), which very fetchingly sets off the space-age style chimney and vent, and pierced the container with openings that serve both a useful function (air, ventilation) and make for a pretty cool “look,” too.

In addition, the restaurant is situated right below “Malahat Building,” also known as the Old Customs House, on a pier that could well deserve the “heritage” designation. While the Inner Harbour has silted up somewhat, it used to be a deep water harbour all the way up the rock edge at the foot of the Customs House. Embedded into the rock are three iron rings (one of which, under water whenever the tide is up, is mightily corroded while the others — above the tide line — are still in good shape). These were the rings that Sir James Douglas’s men attached to the rock to tie up their ship after they sailed to Vancouver Island in the 1840s — they’re effectively what remains of the decision by the initial European explorers — James Douglas, actually — to make this particular place the birthplace of what would become British Columbia.

In recent years, that particular spot became a favoured locale for drunks and junkies to congregate and watch the sun setting over the harbour behind the Sooke Hills. After they finished drinking and shooting up, they smashed their bottles on to the rocks and chucked their needles into the shrubs that cling to the edge. When Red Fish Blue Fish was building its facility, that activity continued every evening. Since they opened three days ago, however, those folks have moved on because the pier is now frequented in the evenings by other people coming to enjoy a meal.

Simon, one of the partners in the restaurant, hopes that the Harbour Authority will eventually build some stairs down to the water’s edge — as he pointed out, it’s the only place all along the city’s Inner Harbour where you can actually touch the water, play in it — and if they do, he and his people will pitch in to clean up the broken glass, clear the debris that accumulated over years of neglect, and let people know that right there, below the “heritage” pier, is Victoria’s equivalent of Plymouth Rock. Well ok, not a rock, exactly: three stout rings, one of which is massively corroded. Thanks to Simon and Red Fish Blue Fish, the corroded ring has been treated to retard or prevent further corrosion. It’s interesting that it took a business owner to make sure that this bit of history doesn’t keep slipping further into the sea…

Quick followup: I noticed that RFBF has a “press” page, which only links, however, to an already disappeared story in the local paper. Not to worry, however, as vibrant Victorians have been following this story on the Vibrant Victoria forum since last December. So, if you’re interested in how this has wound its way through city hall etc., read more on the forum…

Not TV

For something a bit less predictable than TV, but pleasurable in an eye-candy sort of way, 3 links to visuals that might intrigue you:

For the designers, via Cool Hunting, there’s wind to light, an installation that “illustrates alternative energy sources in the form of a cloud of LEDs. Mini wind turbines power the lights (both are mounted on poles); as the wind moves through them, it creates a visual pattern.” There’s a Quicktime video of the installation here. It’s a prototype and beginning of an art form that could (should) be deployed more in our “urbanscapes.”

Via the Doc Searls weblog, a pointer to an “animation made by digital media artist Aaron Koblin, airplane traffic looks much like fireworks in the night sky. Using air-traffic data from the Federal Aviation Administration, categorized using criteria such as ‘types of aircraft,’ ‘location,’ and ‘altitude,’ Koblin shows the changing dynamics of air traffic over the United States and Canada over a 24-hour period.” (From Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge) Watch the video by clicking here. Great soundtrack, by the way.

Finally, via links via facebook via groups thereon, a link via Upgrade! Vancouver (found via facebook groups — cause Roland Tanglao joined, I think, and this showed up in my “feed”…), a link to a 2007 movie by Peter Horvath, Boulevard. Description: “In Boulevard we follow a striking woman, the passenger of a convertible car, driven by an unidentified driver through the city, passing its generic streets, billboards and motels, with an unknown destination.” It’s a bit slow getting started, and it remains “slow,” but there’s something about it that makes you want to keep watching. Just in case. Spoiler: nothing happens. But it’s interesting, all the same.

(n.b.: for some reason, the Upgrade!Vancouver link won’t work, so here’s one for Upgrade!Berlin. Just use it as a jumping-off point: if you scroll down, you’ll see the links to all the other global Upgrade! locations. I hope. Those internets. Sometimes they can be persnicketty…)

Social class on social networks: and style?

danah boyd has a new article out called Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace, which everybody seems to be reading (and, looking at her blog, commenting on — two hundred comments and counting…) Basic thesis: facebook attracts more upwardly mobile college-bound types, while MySpace attracts non-college-bound, possibly declasse or lower-class or outcast-type kids.

I’m curious to know whether the design was the egg or the chicken here: I confess that MySpace pages look cluttered and messy to me, and I get weirded out by the fact that all sorts of applications (sound, video, music, whatever) start up when I click through to some pages. In other words, I have to let MySpace roll all over me, and that pisses me off (well, not really, but I’m like, Hey, can you let me decide when I want to hear your stupid music or see your movie?). I want my eyes to control everything first, and then I push the buttons (mouse & click the links), not lie there and think of England while some MySpaceling has its way with me.

So, does the style attract people who violate “nice” rules about tidy spaces and imaginary “protocol,” or is the style a result of people using MySpace in a really trashy way? Can the technology even have that sort of malleability? That sort of ability to respond? I don’t think so, which means that from where I’m sitting, MySpace design or style is “trashy” and non-eye-centered (non-controlling) first, and that therefore it attracts the more anarchic among us.

(I am exaggerating slightly when I describe myself as such a control freak in the above paragraph. Slightly. A bit.)

Tolerance for overflowing sensation, an ability to “live” with many people, in a tribe, vs in a more distilled fashion: I think that factors into things, too. Is it a class issue? Possibly, but there’re always exceptions to the rule. From boyd’s essay:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.

Right here there’s a snag: this passage describes me pretty much to a “t” (except for the Latina/Hispanic part, although I was an immigrant). My parents didn’t go to college, thought it would be a waste of time for me to go, were surprised I bothered finishing high school — which I barely did, a year and a bit “early,” too often too stoned to know what was going on, but desperate to get out so I could get a job — waitressing, incidentally — and make enough money to move away from home. I purposely skipped my high school graduation, because you wouldn’t have caught me dead trying to be pretty and stupid in a prom dress or sucking up to some old fart handing out diplomas. (I even skipped my B.A. graduation at UBC, and the M.A., and when I finally did go to one of my graduations — the Ph.D. ceremony at Harvard — I grinned at the Dean handing me my sheepskin, but I had the worst migraine in the world: I was smiling through pain, lots of it… Analyze that!)

Would I have gravitated to MySpace then, had it been around?

I don’t think so. I think one of my problems was stimuli overload (which explains the self-medication with drugs), and it was important for me to get enough control over my environment so that I could shut things out because it was difficult for me to handle the intensity of sensation I experienced. Experience. To this day, I find it crushing to be with people all day long: it’s too much. I vant to be alone is the rallying cry not just of Swedish actresses. Too much to observe, to pay attention to, to modulate, choreograph, perform, and respond to: after a day with lots of people, I’m exhausted. MySpace is an onslaught of entire rooms-full of people talking all at once, like a bad high school day times 10. In comparison, I guess Facebook is like meeting over coffee. Mocha vanilla latte, frapped. Maybe that’s our class structure today.

Yoo-hoo! Mark Zuckerberg, can you see my face(book)?

I registered my Facebook account on September 8, 2006, admittedly spurred by the fact that it was developed by a smart young guy at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg. (Ok, so by September 2006 Mark had long dropped out of Harvard! Nonetheless, that old school loyalty worked its magic…)

I was part of the “Harvard network,” but I wanted to join my regional network, too. Well, guess what? It doesn’t exist, according to Facebook. Facebook — Mark?, Mark?, can you hear me?? — thinks that we in Victoria (the capital city of British Columbia) on Vancouver Island (a distinct, separate-from-the-continent geologic fact and entity — belong to a network called…”Vancouver, BC.” This is an insult, not to mention a grave, grievous error.

Mark, Mark, Mark: where did we go wrong with you at Harvard, my dear boy?? Sweetie, we realize you’re just a drop-out, but we can overcome this if we work together, ‘k? It’s not too late…

First thing you must do is GET AN ATLAS. Get a map. I believe there’s a nifty application called maps.google.com around. Type in V8V4J4. That’s my postal code (yes, postal code — we don’t zip in Canada, we go quietly postal…). Note the location! Please note that we are a capital city. (Well, not me personally, not even in the majestatis pluralis, but “we,” the city of Victoria.) We’re a distinct metropolitan centre, located on a large (very large) island. Our city actually lies below the 49th parallel. We’re practically breathing down your neck!

Mark, according to FastCompany, you took art history classes! Darling, that’s where you and I have a bond, don’t you see? I took my PhD in art history at Harvard, and you … well, you dropped out of Harvard’s art history classes — but not before having that key epiphany that only a high-pressure art history course can deliver. I quote from FastCompany:

…by the end of the first semester, with just two days to go before his art-history final, [Mark Zuckerberg] was in a serious jam: He needed to be able to discuss 500 images from the Augustan period. “This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just go in and figure out how to do it, like calculus or math,” he says, without a trace of irony. “You actually have to learn these things ahead of time.” So he pulled a Tom Sawyer: He built a Web site with one image per page and a place for comments. Then he emailed members of his class and invited them to share their notes, like a study group on cybersteroids. “Within two hours, all the images were populated with notes,” he says. “I did very well in that class. We all did.”

Ok, now that a bona fide WEB ENTREPRENEUR has admitted that art history can be more complex to deal with than math and calculus (which “you can just go in and figure out how to do”), I can die happy.

Maybe.

Maybe, that is, if Mark Zuckerberg relents and satisfies the demand of nearly 4,200 members who joined Petition for a Victoria BC network.

Mark! Mark Zuckerberg! Fellow Harvard art history student! How can you ignore this?

Why, even our dead-dog mainstream media has awoken and taken an interest (and believe me, bubbe, it takes a lot to get them to sit up and take notice): from today’s local paper, According to Facebook, the Island doesn’t exist. Mark!, Mark — these people normally don’t notice that their own backsides don’t exist, yet they have registered that you, my fellow Harvard art history colleague, have failed to register our existence. Mark!, Mark — can this go on???

As the art-history-bereft local media point out, “More than 11,000 Islanders have joined a petition group urging Facebook to create a Vancouver Island ‘network’ that would unite them with a specific online identity.”

Mark!, Mark — listen! That journalist is talking about 11,000 people on Vancouver Island who don’t have a Vancouver Island network! I refer you again to maps.google.com — I bet you’ve heard of it, now that you’re out of upstate New York and Massachusetts, and living in California. Hey, I bet you even get to hang out with Sergei and Larry! So look, Mark: Vancouver Island is pretty big — not too dense (sometimes stupid, maybe, but not dense in population terms) — but that makes 11,000 members even more remarkable. The other thing you gotta grok is that Victoria, the city that hangs on the south-eastern coast of said island, is the capital of British Columbia. Dude, I have a friend in the Olympia, WA network! It’s seriously crazy to give Olympia its own network (given its relation to Seattle), but deny Victoria its own in relation to Vancouver.

So Mark, listen up: we are not face-less and we want Facebook to recognize our network — because in terms of social capital, that’s networth.