Texts Without Contexts, Authors Without Revenue Streams, Digerati With Doubts

FASCINATING ARTICLE in the Sunday New York Times this week that examines web texts, and the current noise and sturm and drang over David Shields' repurposed book that's much in the news.

But what really caught my eye in Michiko Kakutani's Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context, were the comments by Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of VR & the Web.  This is a guy I interviewed fifteen years ago, way back in the gee shucks days of the web.

An excerpt:

THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur. 

Kakutani goes to point out a 2006 NYTimes magazine article by Kevin Kelly that suggested a day where all text would mingle.  And it's here that the two most interesting points get made.  These are the central texts that bring together, for me, questions about Web 2.0 projects, Webisode storytelling models, and even the recent contentious fights over copyright:

As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”

Then Lanier brings it home with comments on the mash-up culture...

To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”

He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

This is the central question that I have yet to see any of the digital polyanas -- or even the fair use, fair dealing maximalists like Michael Geist, deal with.   No one seems to be able to suggest how the current seed stock will be replaced.  It doesn't help matters when smart guys like Geist -- who work in the tenured worlds of academia -- pooh pooh things like collective licensing out of hand,* but don't really  engage on the question of how authors, screenwriters, or certain types of artists who don't have immediately monetizable revenue streams (or entrepeneurial mindsets) get to earn some gelt for their efforts. 

EDIT*(the crossed out section above represents what might be a too-harsh and not entirely accurate view of Geist's concerns about collective licensing.  However, I do feel frustration that like a lot of the fair-dealing expansion crowd -- he comes down on a very wide interpretation of use, while not engaging entirely on the mechanisms by which people like me will be able to, oh, I don't know, not have to work at Home Depot.)

A provocative article...and all the more interesting because the guys who I remember trumpeting the upside early -- Doug Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier -- seem to be the only ones who see the problems & wrinkles inherent in the mediascape that we're already inhabiting...

...never mind what comes next.

State of the Digital Nation

WELL FIRST OF ALL, I have to say I am tremendously relieved.  I have often thought that the only thing LOST was missing was an inscrutable Japanese guy trimming a bonsai tree.

The other program I watched last night managed to both not live up to, and exceed my expectations.  The Frontline doc DIGITAL NATION was excellent. And lo and behold, if you didn't manage to see it, you can watch it online at the PBS site.  And lo and behold Canadians, this means you, too.  PBS does not geoblock its broadcasts.  Thank you, public television!

I do think that the most interesting and provocative parts were the earliest ones, where correspondent Douglas Rushkoff and Producer/Director Rachel Dretzin, broke down the reality of our distracted age -- the falling critical thinking skills of even our top students, the inability to write connected coherent paragraphs -- and the revelation that studies show that multitaskers suck at multitasking, utterly.  We all can agree that the scourge of texting while driving is bad, but it's notable and interesting to see how much our digital appendages are hurting us in other ways.

The other thing that got to me was the passage on video game addiction.  Not because of the subject itself. I've seen it, it's all rather played out for me -- but because they had this whole passage where a South Korean kid was sent to camp for a couple of weeks without the computer, and admitted that (while he seemed to be having fun) he was really thinking about getting back to the games.

I think back to my own childhood and the amount of unstructured play it contained -- running around in the woods behind my house in New City, New York, or swimming or riding bikes through the neighborhood in Orlando, or climbing trees & hide & go seek in Canada -- and I can't help but feel bad for today's kids.  I was never athletic, except for a couple years when I swam in Florida.  But in addition to bumbling my way through Little League games & Soccer -- there was just a whole lot of running around without a plan.  And I still managed to watch too damn much TV.  There's an image in the Doc of Dretzin in her kitchen cooking dinner, looking out at the living room where one son is on a laptop, her husband's on another, and the two younger kids play with her Iphone -- that's just a little bit heartbreaking.

But I should have known that with Doug involved, the balance would ultimately tip positive. And the Doc does a great job of telling that side of the story, too.  Failing schools in the Bronx that have reversed falling test scores through re-imagining the role of technology, better work environments through virtual spaces, and the continuing drive for community -- which is the part of it that fascinated me all those years ago when I was on MediaTelevision.

I write these entries quick and tend not to edit them too much, so they are usually first blurt. And sometimes that means I look back on the entries like the one I did yesterday promoting this Doc and think, "mmm, did you mean to be that negative?"   And I didn't. So I'm glad that the doc is ultimately balanced about what is gained and lost in the Digital Nation.

But the point that I made regarding the Social Media Week still stands. The worst sin of those promoting new media has always been the "throw the baby out with the bathwater" evangelism that assumes too much.  Like the fact that everyone is a great multitasker or will be, going forward.  What I took from the Doc last night was that the ubiquity of new communication tech has indeed changed us -- not always for the better. But the connections and stories we crave are still rooted in the same space.  It is, as McLuhan always maintained, evolution not revolution. One media does not replace or cannibalize another.

So I don't know where Television is going or what the thing we now think of as Television will be in a few years. But the people who insist it's going to die need to take a step back and separate the hype from the research of how people respond to creativity.

One of the most interesting things I think has come out of the digital space lately is the quiet realization that the technology can't drive it alone.  As games get more complex, game companies are starting to realize that yes, they actually do need writers to come up with stuff -- the designers can't drive the bus by themselves.

And as distractions mount and defeat us all, some of us have learned to seize back the ability to concentrate on just one thing at a time.  What is the Pomodoro technique if not that?  I've just had the three most focused days of work I've had in months -- truly exhausting days. And they were defined entirely by 25 minute countdowns where I couldn't check email or be distracted in any way, shape or form.

Anyway, Digital Nation is good brain food.  Again, everybody should watch it.

You're Not the Taskmaster You Think You Are

I HAVE SEVERE OUTLINE-head.  There is no way I'll be following LOST tonight. I wonder if that'll make it better?

But just a wee little program note to any and all of you cavorting through Social Media Week this week in Toronto...

Tonight at 9pm on PBS Frontline is a doc I think you should probably see.  A long time ago, back in my pre-writing, I like TV storytelling days, I was a producer on this forward looking, big buzzword show. I did a bunch of think tanks back in the SHIFT magazine days with a guy named Douglas Rushkoff. Great guy, wonderful writer, big enthusiast for the brave new digital world and how it was all gonna change us all and how we were going to be big old multitaskers...

In the early 1990's Rushkoff wrote regularly for Wired Magazine, and wrote books that chronicled the changing mind of the digerati.

Well tonight, he's participating in this doc, and throwing a bit of cold water. The pre-release hype for this doc has focused on one fairly salient piece of info: all that hype about everybody younger growing up being big multitaskers -- turns out to be bullshit. Not borne out by the data.  Turns out when you're doing nine things at once, you're not very good at any of those things -- no matter what your age or demo or how hip to the lingo you are.

I point this out because I think one of the articles I read about Social Media week today said something about how all the people who watch TV will be dead in a few years.

Well, jinkies, I was there the first time we started talking that foolishness. Sometimes, hype is just hype.  And for those of us watching the CaseCamp Digital Media rah rah space from the "seen it before" seats, it's all rather...twee.  I know you think that makes us all haters, and out of touch. But then again, we've been talking about this stuff since you were trying to find out where babies came from.

Watch the Doc. See what you think.  If Doug Rushkoff can come to doubt the gospel, then man, you need to check yourself, dude.  Cause once upon a time...

Ask A Stupid Question...

THE TORONTO STAR yesterday was all over a new study by Ad Agency Bensimon Byrne that should have nervous nellies all through the Canadian TV biz making dookie in their shorts.  Too bad the thing reads as a shoddy retread that's been pre-debunked.


Among the 'revelations' in Dana Flavelle's article:

People are twittering and on the computer and not paying attention to the ads.

Um, you know. Which is different than, uh...getting up to make a sandwich or take a leak or any one of the number of other things people have been doing to avoid ads since, oh, I don't know...the birth of television.


And advertising, as we all know, in the world of pre-Twitter & the falling sky, was always designed so ads only ever aired once, because it's entirely a new, 21st century, post cell phone and computer phenom that people are distracted during ads and might need to see them several times before the message gets through.


Elsewhere in this crackerjack, methodically bullet-proof study, as re- typed by Flavelle:

Just over half of PVR owners use them to record the majority of the shows they watch and eight in 10 report that they fast-forward through the commercials, the study found.

"report" is the key word here. If you asked me in a survey, I would probably say that I always fast forward through the commercials, too.  So howcum when I played HOUSE back on PVR late Monday night, I saw about 3/4 of the ads?  Because I forgot to FF, or a commercial caught my attention, or ... I just didn't.


Studies that actually look at the DATA collected from Peoplemeters have long since refuted the conventional wisdom.  More than a year ago, one study showed that The Office was one of the least fast-forwarded programs...and that programs that caught a well-heeled audience tended not to be skipped as much.  Then last fall came the news that, based on the actual data, people weren't skipping as much as they thought.  (I'm not going searching for the links here, but both studies were widely reported at the time, and I believe I blogged about these findings, too.)


So why this report now?  Well, maybe  it's the latest hit of the "Canada's two years behind" phenom. 


Or maybe it's just that one dying medium (newspapers) likes to deflect the pain to another "dying" medium (TV) whenever they can.


In a related story, I'm sure that Bensimon's Byrne's next study will reveal that nobody is affected by advertising, they report -- but they totally think everybody else but them totally is. 


Totally.


You think they have a new media advertising department? Oh wait. They do?


Quel Shocker.

If I Twittered your Facebook, Would You Stumbleupon Myspace?

FRIEND OF STICKSVILLE Cathleen MacDonald is part of an interesting venture that also includes the Writer Mafia's own Jill Golick -- Crushing It.. a ... oh heck, I'm going to let the release explain it.

People will be following, participating in, and sharing stories when the comedy series, CRUSHING IT, unfolds in real time on social media from February 1st, 2010 through to February 5th. That’s the topic of a panel discussion to be presented as part of Social Media Week at the Rivoli Theatre, Toronto, on Thursday, February 4th, 3:30pm.

Jill Golick be doing the panel on the project at the Rivoli on Thursday February 4.  

For more info on Crushing It...  on Social Media Week ...

Or to find out more about the panel, email Cathleen here.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

THE MOST INTERESTING thing I heard on the subject of "new media" and storytelling last week was relayed to me by someone who attended the first World Congress of Screenwriters in Athens, Greece last month.

Apparently there was this presentation, see.  All about the British networking and social media site Bebo.  Bebo is  a UK Facebook for Under 18's.  In 2007-08 they an original web series called "Kate Modern." This was basically a Brit Lonely Girl15, made by the same producers for the British audience and premiered on Bebo.

Because it's viewable and eminently trackable, the makers of Kate Modern could see how the viewers interact with the material.  (Oh, yeah, it's interactive -- cause everything has to be interactive, right? Because this newfangled generation, they demand it! Their minds are wired differently!)

So there should be all that juicy data about who was doing video blogs, sharing clues, theories, and "taking part in" the world, right?

Well apparently what they found out was that about  1 - 2% of the users were "highly interactive" with the material.

...about another 9% or so were "somewhat interactive" with it.

...and 90%?  Watched it completely passively.  Just like TeeVee.

Oh Brave New World that has such people in it!

Network Viral: It Can Be Done.

IF THE CANADIAN NETWORKS manage to survive to 2013, they should be just about caught up enough in their thinking to start trying to engage with viral videos like, oh, other networks are doing in 2009...

Satan's Minion

MMM. THAT OTHER DENNIS sure is a wack job.

And now you can see why.

I got scooped down here in the comments, but the Canadian Film Centre's new Webseries MY PAL SATAN goes live today.

I've seen all six episodes, and trust me when I say that it starts out tame and takes the train to crazy town. Good to see Rachel Wilson

though, since I'll soon be working with her out in Newfoundland on Republic of Doyle. It takes a certain kind of freshness to play straight (wo)man to the embodiment of the bringer of tears, the Prince of Lies, and the Master of Disaster.

No, not Apollo Creed, Dicksmack.

Creator Dennis Heaton has said the web series, which is the first of its kind for the CFC, is an apology to everything he ever did in his twenties.

Or something like that. When Heaton talks I just kind of get sleepy. Then I wake up two hours, covered in lipstick and rose petals, pants round my ankles, a splitting headache and a sore ear.

A sore ear. What do you with the ear, you monster?

Heaton likes trolling the absurd in old horror tropes, having previously given us the Zombie-Pet comedy FIDO, and having staffed on J-Pod.

(Doug Coupland has nice words for Monsieur Heaton on the Satan site...the guy's obviously a fan.)

The combination of affability and old sitcom tropes and truly...odd... obsessions makes for a scatalogical stew that deconstructs both TV, the "friend/roommate" sitcom, and pretty much the nature of TV itself.

Is there a model here? Who the hell knows? Everybody's taking a flyer.

But I can't say I wouldn't watch SATAN at 12:45 am on TV, around about the time you go looking for Cheetos and think about ordering a pizza...if you know what I mean.

C'mon, Keys to the VIP has a following. And that's basically a postcard to date rape.

Go take a look and check out the twice-weekly episodes yourself. There'll be new ones up every Monday and Thursday until July 9th.

Guest Post: Why Fanfiction Doesn't (Always) Suck

TODAY'S GUEST POST is from up and coming, recently minted CFC alumnus and screenwriter Elize Morgan, and comprises her insights gleaned from the NextMedia conference in Banff. You can follow Elize's blog here.

***

See, there's this thing out there about how fanfiction (or “fic” to those in the know) is an absolute perversion of the artist's original, pure creation.

There's even been some smack talk on the internet about how fic writers just write what people want to see, not what's good to story, but I'm here to say that's all crap. Hooey if one might.

That maybe, even, that fic writers have a place in our industry.

And before the gasps of outrage over what might be seen as the crazed lack of control that will spiral into a crazy world where anarchy is prevalent and the Conservatives decrease funding to the CBC (...wait), allow me to throw out a few of the ideas some of those very smart folk at NextMedia were mentioning: that there's a collective audience out there for shows that sometimes get lost, and that audience wants to play along.

Especially if your show is 20 plus seasons long. Because in that case, you might as well ask your fans to get involved. This is a collaborative medium anyway, not a sandbox of one. Sandboxes of one get really boring, and, legal issues aside (this is fair use in the US staring at you in the face) it's free marketing.

Now we're not talking following what fan forums are asking for in the story lines to a tee, from Martin Wood's interview here:

You learn that the majority of your audience is not responding on those things. So a relatively small number of people are being very loud about what they want. If you respond to it the way you think you should, it's not necessarily the best thing for the show.

No, this is part of the art of marketing. By asking the fans to come on board you extend that extra little bit to your 0.02 per cent audience that want a little bit more anyway. They just want to be involved that extra titch, and that can lend itself to creating a hugely collaborative online space that extends the TV show itself.

After all, if we're collaborating on seasons after creators leave, why not. If they're going to do it anyway – because they can, and let's face it, they will – then let's make it work for that free marketing space it can work out to be.

And that marketing space – the contests and contexts that can be created with a participatory audience are almost expected at this point. Kid shows and animation demand the interactive before the show pitch even begins, and that audience is ageing up quick and unlikely to demand less from their prime time viewing.

Fan fiction doesn't need to be the elephant in the room – fans are willing to take it down a notch to make it “safe”, and the point is, at the end of the day, is that it's already being done.

Gary Carter – CCO of FMX and COO of FremantleMedia - controller of so many properties it's depressing to think of – mentioned a fic contest they did, to drum up some support for their soap. And it's here that they realized that the audiences are not only willing to play along, but they want to do it.

Fans are not your grandma's basement dwellers anymore. They do grand gestures to save TV shows, send sunflower seeds to get noticed, and generally raise a ruckus. Why not include them in the interactive pitch?

And, at the heart of this, it isn't just about TV anymore – Mike Kasprow from Trapeze said it best at NextMedia:

It's not about the control of the story elements, [but] about being part of the dialogue.

And that, is the end game of all things like TV. Although most of the stats from NextMedia showed that actually kids are still watching TV the conventional way, thank you very much (North American stats from Youthography - and that TV isn't dead. But – and it's a big but – those kids spend more time on a lot of the websites than they do on the shows themselves.

And if your audience feel that they're part of the dialogue – like the fan fiction contest FremantleMedia ran for their soap Neighbours, to other long form contests, it means that not only does fan fiction really not suck, it's a part of the culture online anyway.

Iiiiiiiiiiiit's SATAN!

MY POOR FRIEND Dennis Heaton (Blood Ties, FIDO) is liable to be up for a lashing from the fundies, thanks to an article in today's Playback Daily.

Cleverly titled "CFC sides with Satan" (Yup, that's gonna look great on a lot of search listings...) it outlines the twisted (oh, and groundbreaking!) shorts now underway, helmed by the man who should never, ever be referred to as "the other Den(n)is."

A series of five-minute shorts about mismatched roommates -- one of them, Old Nick himself -- has gone to camera at the Canadian Film Centre through its TV pilot program. My Pal, Satan by writer/creator Dennis Heaton features Rachel Wilson as a "fresh-faced Pollyanna" who happens to split her rent with the Devil, played by Jefferson Brown.

Their clashes range from mundane matters, such as toilet seat placement, to the cosmic.

Heaton (Fido, Blood Ties) also showruns, working with CFCers including producer Bryce Mitchell (For All the Marbles) and director Vivieno Caldinelli (Hotbox).

The six shorts are expected to be online at the CFC site, perhaps by spring, with hopes of snaring a broadcaster's attention.

Notice to fulminating fundies: Heaton is more than up for the job of Secular Paladin of truth, skepticism, and the frickin hilarious.

Two Point Oh Teen Webshow Goodness

COLLEAGUE JILL GOLICK has been exploring the world of web-delivered video content for some time now, and has written about it extensively on one of her blogs, Story2oh.com.

She's now debuting her next project, which looks like a lot of fun.

From the Press Release:

TORONTO, March 27, 2009 — Story2.OH and giraffesoft introduce Hailey Hacks, a series of web videos starring Toronto grade 6 student, Marlee Maslove. Hailey (Maslove) is the Hermione Grainger of web wizardry showing 8-13 year olds all kinds of cool things they can do with their computers.

“Kids have these very powerful machines at their fingertips,” says series creator Jill Golick, “but no one’s teaching them the incredible scope of what they can do with them.” The mandate of the series is to broaden tweens’ use of the computer beyond games, Google and YouTube to include the wider world of blogs, widgets, RSS feeds, social bookmarks and the amazing tools that exist on the web for creating, collaborating and communicating.

My standard rap on the future of web video tends to be that there's probably a 13 year old girl out there who has the secret to doing it right. Smart move, Jill... targeting the demo for whom Web Video is already no big deal, especially in the country that already seems to be an early and heavy adopter of the web video experience.

On the web: www.haileyhacks.com

The Nasty Spat

THE DAILY BEAST is full of the juicy internecine Hollywood-warfare battle between old privileged establishment media and newfangled web-based media.

Peter Bart vs. Nikki Finke -- go read it at the Beast.

There may be a great deal of validity in Variety’s discussion of blogging in general and Finke in particular. But she is largely inoculated by the simple phrase, “consider the source.” Variety’s Bart—who obviously ordered up this assault—would be in a far better position if he were not guilty of two cardinal sins: transparently carrying the studios’ water on many occasions and ceding so much of the turf of real news coverage that there was plenty of soil in which a blogger with Finke’s news chops and outsized personality could take root.

Finke is truly a larger-than-life figure in Hollywood, a place thickly populated with big personalities. The former debutante is much discussed but rarely seen; no photograph of recent vintage has found its way onto the Internet. She is accused of being many unpleasant things: shrill, vindictive, self-promoting and more. But what can’t be disputed is that she has broken some important news, notably NBC-Universal’s hiring of Ben Silverman to run the network and more recently, the fact that Peter Chernin was leaving his job as Rupert Murdoch’s number-two man at News Corp.

Thanks in part to a loyal cadre sources and to the enormous vacuum she filled during the writers’ strike, Finke’s column has become a must-read in Hollywood. And clearly, Variety’s Bart cannot take it any more.

Bart's weirdo weekend Variety column.

More piling on.

And the Finke, the whole Finke, and nothing but the Finke.

For my part, I have to say, that it's clear Variety still has no idea how much it hurt its credibility by being so in the tank for the congloms during the WGA strike.

Note to dead tree media: the whole populist anger against big business thing is growing... if EVER there was a time to not be shackled to the old elites, it's now. Finke's gone from 'whodat?' to first read in a startlingly small amount of time. You can ask why, or you can......oh, right, okay, you can write hit pieces in your increasingly irrelevant rag. Right. Choice made. Next!

EDIT: Finke responds. Oooh. Did Variety really try to BUY DHD? This looks uglier with every passing second.

F*%%tardery, and the Creative Gap

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Brave New World (Not Fully Distributed Yet)

OR...THE PRECISE MOMENT FACEBOOK STARTED TO SUCK. (FOR ME.)

THE BEST WAY I've heard all the head-scratching over "how do we approach storytelling in a digital medium" described was in this quote from William Gibson: "the future's already here. It just isn't fully distributed yet."

The music business sucked for years -- offering a warmed over product at too high a price point -- before Shawn Fanning came along and blew it all to hell.

And the person who is going to make the first jillion on the killer storytelling ap on the 'Net is already out there, right now. Maybe they're only four or five. Or maybe they're rounding out their angry teenager phase. But I'm pretty sure they're out there.

One of the obstacles to change, though, is always going to be those who simply don't get it. I kind of completely despise these people. No, let me remove the qualifier. It hate these people.

They're the same people who sniff at any change like removing Classical music from a public radio service barely anyone listens to. They're the people who whine whenever a handheld camera shot graces the TeeVee, whether the shot is motivated or not. They're the ones who immediately dismiss any music they aren't immediately familiar with as 'noise.' They're the people who reacted violently when they made Starbuck a girl.

And apparently they got shirty with Jill Golick last night.

If you've been following Jill's storytelling experiment, story2oh, you might have known about the two experiments she conducted earlier this year -- a combination of social networking profiles and wall posts on Facebook, and video podcasts, twitters, and other methods used to move a story along that wasn't quite performance, and wasn't quite narrative. It melded real and unreal. It was pretty neat.

Last night, Jill presented her findings at Casecamp. And a few people were...well, upset to learn that -- omigod -- some of the people who "friended" them as part of Story2oh were fictional constructs.

That was kind of the point.

Most people got it.

But a few didn't. And in classic fucktard, "I don't get it" fashion, they waded in and got all the story2oh characters deleted from Facebook this morning.

Game over.

Jill has a very evenhanded and philosophical take on the thing over at the story2oh site.

It’s sad because it was fun having them on Facebook and using Facebook for storytelling way back in January was a really effective way to communicate with the audience. But even by early March when we ran the second experiment, Facebook was already too crowded an environment and we did very little storytelling in that venue.

It seems to me that early this year, Facebook took a strong cultural shift. Instead of being an underground play space it turned into a business must-have. People are serious about and on Facebook.

I made a rather large boo-boo in not taking this cultural shift into account. Some of the attendees had gotten friendship requests from Simon and Ali and were upset to learn that imaginary people were rubbing shoulders with them. I did apologize to them, from stage and again in person — rather profusely in fact. But too little too late apparently.

If any of them are reading this, I do apologize once again and especially the woman with dark hair who questioned me from the audience. I would have sent flowers this morning if I knew who you are.

Jill is, I guess, simply a better person than I am. Because I'm not as sanguine about the whole thing. A culture defined by the uptight is no culture at all.

The future is already here. But luckily, we've got plenty of fucktards ready to keep us from fully distributing it.

Idiots.

or should I say...Idiots 1.0.