Drive In Reality Theatre Peace Arch Crossing

Pretty nifty art, eh? Find out more about it at Wired. I think I liked it better when I thought it was a drive-in screen, but maybe I was just ….

projecting.

Oh, if only my old computer George were still with us! Truly should George’s passage be mourned throughout the interwebs, for upon George is the only copy I have of one of my best short stories, one that would be a perfect addendum to this post, about a middling hypnotist who gets to do his routine in front of a very posh crowd for once in his life, slightly overreaches, and accidentally drives the entire group of Bilderbergers irrevocably insane.

Oopsie.

As a replacement, please enjoy listening to this audiorecording of the somewhat absurd and extremely creepy Sticks, the only short story of Karl Edward Wagner‘s that I ever really liked (nice guy, but better editor than writer). Best listened to by candlelight, in a remote cabin in the woods.

Audio via RadioDramaRevival.com

Bear with me, because I’m going to be tinkering. This entire post is going to be tinkering with the audio player at WordPress and seeing if I can get the Telephone Your Blog thingy to accept mp3′s, which would be a nifty trick indeedy. So, like I said, bear with me.

First attempt: Bog standard WP audioplayer with hotlinked mp3 from the Guardian’s piece on lithophones, computer-enhanced xylophones made out of the stones of the Lake District. This would be, I suppose, that upon which the Druids rocked out.

Okie dokey, it appears the Guardian podcasts allow hotlinking. Booya!

Now on to test the Telephone Your Blog thingy with a downloaded and uploaded via telephone mp3; the same one, because yea, I am very lazy.

So now, I have to save the mp3 to my hard drive, then I open Skype because the office phone won’t make a long-distance call and I still don’t have a cellphone and wouldn’t use the minutes on it for this even if I did, and I dial the number and punch in the code (how does one do that on Skype? Guess I’ll find out) and then I somehow play the mp3 into the headset which would be much easier with a proper mic and not just the headphones propped up against a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince so the mic hovers around one of the speakers. At least, I THINK that’s the speaker; it might be an air vent or, more likely for Eve here (that’s my computer) an inlet to allow the gin in on those rare occasions it doesn’t make it from the glass into my mouth with the precision one hopes, but has no right to expect, it would after two already and where was I? Right, Harry Potter and the Lithophones of the Lakes. I’d better bring up an mp3 player, too, hadn’t I? I’ll take a flyer on Windows Media Player, because Zune and iTunes kill the speed on this computer. Wish me luck; did I say that already?

Oh, I’m gonna fart. PAUSE. Oh, it wants to tell me something. Apparently xvidcore.dll cannot be found. Well, that’s great, because I wasn’t looking for it in the first place.

Okay, so here’s what happened. I got Skype to open, and got it to call the blog. Then I input my code and started jabbering, which you can hear above. It appears that as soon as I took my earphone jack out of the computer and double-clicked the mp3 to play it, Skype crashed. That’s probably because, instead of Windows Media Player, which I had open and wanted to play it on, the darn thing opened Zune, which is huge and baroque and always kills things on my computer and causes the fan to go into classic silent-film-worthy conippification fits. So. Must find small, slick, non-interferesome mp3 player OR load the puppy into something I can play on the stereo while running Skype on the computer.

The life of a worker-arounder is not a restful one.

Oh, and then I had to go in and steal the telephoned/Skyped mp3 from the standalone post it automatically made called Audio Post and put it here. And now I think I’m going to go off and read Harry Potter and ponder some more.

Don’t ask me. I just blog this stuff.

So, is that what you call a podcast?

As most of our readers know, Fearless City Mobile was all over the Heart of the City Festival this past weekend, streaming live video interviews and interacting with people all over the Downtown Eastside, incorporating their texted questions into the interviews as they came in.

As some of you also know, interest in our coverage of the closing gala was so intense that it temporarily overwhelmed our servers and our site had to go for a little “time out.” While that’s flattering, it’s also a bit of a problem.

Fortunately, because the internet IS, in fact, a web and not just a series of straight lines, we were able to work around it.

I was at home on Twitter, bouncing between the FearlessCity account and my own (because I have no life) and Irwin was in Ottawa and on Facebook when the site went down.

Irwin had used his phone to take a video of OUR streaming videos on his laptop, and he posted it to Facebook and put that news out on his Twitter stream.

I saw that and immediately emailed him, telling him to put it on YouTube (yes, I know the quality sucks, but at least YouTube is wide open to the public, whereas Facebook is restricted). He did, and once it was posted I put the news out on the Fearless City Twitter stream. Then I signed out, signed into my raincoaster Twitter stream, and re-tweeted it (don’t laugh, that’s what it’s called!) and Irwin put the news out on his stream as well. That makes a total of about 400 people who got the news within a half-hour of the whole thing happening.

The video became, if memory serves, the 68th most viewed Canadian video in the Arts & Activism category, but it only has two comments, so what are you waiting for?

And here it is:

Three scenes captured with Nokia N77 mobile devices streaming to the Mobile Muse 3 platform and projected on a live screen at the Closing Gala of the Heart of the City Festival in the Downtown Eastside. Also streamed to http://live.fearlessmedia.ca/ and archived on fearlesscity.ca.
At the live screen people were able to send txt msgs to the 3 interviewed subjects.
(The audio on this video switches between all three channels.)
Nov 9, 2008