TomMannino.com

A surprising source of motivation and inspiration from Tay Zonday.

Put your home studio by your kitchen. When you’re taking out the garbage and say “wow I have these eight notes in my head,” you can drop the garbage in the living room and lose yourself for ten hours in one flawless impulse. If you have to go up the steps and into a dedicated “music room,” you will tell yourself “I’ll record those notes after I take out the garbage.” But then you will get back and see that the recycling also needs to be taken out. Then you will see that your car tabs still need to be paid. Then you will see that it’s March and you never mailed the Christmas thank-you-card for that gift that you got.

Those notes in your head might have been a Grammy or might have touched the lives of millions. They will die because you failed them. You failed to prepare your life for the creative emergency. You put smoke detectors in your house but you didn’t put that pen and paper by your bed. You weren’t prepared to sing at 3AM and wake the neighbors if you had to. You weren’t prepared to fuck the world and fuck the haters and block the interstate because you had a music emergency. You had a silence emergency. You had a prophecy and maybe you needed to steamroll some flower beds. Maybe you needed to step on some toes and push some bodies out of the way.

But you wussed out. You said “maybe I can do both!” “Maybe I can make music and keep the neighbors happy! Maybe I can make music and not forget to pay the doctor bill for five months! Maybe I’ll only make noise certain hours of the day! Maybe I’ll only sing inside my sound booth! Maybe I’ll do that once I’m in that part of the apartment. Maybe I’ll never do it.”

via broken cool.: broken cool Feature: Catching Up With The “Chocolate Rain” Guy.

I think you should donate some moneys to the Consumerist!  They want to try to stay ad-free!  And not just because Megh is one of my oldest friends!  And also not because they need to post more pictures of cats!

Wow.. YouTube just launched ’shows’.  Basically Hulu and all that.  You can watch Married with Children on Youtube.

This is kind of a big deal!

YouTube – Broadcast Yourself..

Edit: Just noticed: Married with Children has an instrumental introduction theme.  Most likey they don’t have the rights to the song or don’t want to pay for it.  Cute!

Very very meta it hurt my head.  But very awesome haha.

We Didn’t Start the Flame War – CollegeHumor Video.

It’s with bittersweet jealousy and joy I link this.  Basically Rocketboom has a site where it explains internet memes, under the header of “The Rocketboom Institute of Internet Studies.”

Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme.

This is a great site.  It looks like they add one video a month or so, their research is flawless.  They really knock it out of the park.  Stuff like this always makes me bite my lip when I see it, and wait for them to fuck up some tiny detail, and immediately write them off.  But no, they kill it.

Here’s the problem: I had come up with basically an identical concept more then two years ago.

http://internetsciencefoundation.org/

I shared the idea with Aaron and we developed it quite a bit, coming up with a ton of ideas, even shot two videos, one where I interviewed the famous cosplayer Adella, and another where we did a test of what happens to an anime convention after prolonged exposure to me dressed as Rick Astley, right in the height of the Rickrolling phenomenon.

The main crux of the idea was indeed to create a somewhat humerus but nonetheless accurate resource for people of all walks of life to turn to to have someone ‘explain the internet’ to them.  Something broad enough that my mom could watch and understand, but also ‘internet’ enough so that younger or more critical internetters would get something out of it.

Seeing this is both a bit disheartening, and inspiring.  I say it a lot, especially when these things happen, a good idea is a good idea for a reason.  I’m really bummed because I would have liked to have worked on that idea, at the very least just casually and do things up, but real life of course gets in the way and the idea got shelved.

At the very least, I’m very happy Rocketboom is doing it and not someone else.  They know their stuff, and are doing a great job with it.  They even did the subtle ideas we had had, about putting pictures and ‘inside jokes’ in the background of the photos.  Aaron and I have embroidered lab coats, Dr. Thomas Mannino, Internet Scientist, etc.  That’s what struck me the most I think, haha.

Regardless, the idea is still on the table.  Obviously we’ll have to tweak it if we want to actually go through with it, but it’s still do-able.  There’s plenty of room for internet scientists on the internet. We had some other, additional ideas related, and it’s going to be hard to not look like copycats but at the very least I’m just always reaffirmed when I see stuff like this happen:

Ideas I have are good, look what happens when people actually make them happen!

Stop-motion animation done with 8-bit pixel graphic paper cutouts.

YouTube – 8-BIT Waterslide in REAL LIFE!.

Huge complicated audio tool, entirely done in Flash.  Amazing.

Hobnox – Audiotool.

This is an advertisement for a book.  VERY well done.

YouTube – A Madness of Angels.

Ridiculously inspirational…

YouTube – Escape From City 17 – Part One.

I think I’m a bit late to the game on this, but I just noticed recently that it appears that NG can/has the ability to have ‘badges’ or basically achievements for games that users submit.  Without looking into it, I’m sure you’d have to use a bit of their code to keep track of things, but it works well.

Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.