TomMannino.com

YouTube – Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy…

Um Fireside Chats much?  This is amazing.  Sign of the times!

YouTube – whitehouse’s Channel.

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!

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!

My good buddy Urban, of Blood Dumpster fame on EndgameRadio, super hilarious dude who I have much bromance for has taken on the persona of Lord Bonecrush, and is visiting our realm with his band of heroes known as the “Adventure Metal” band Dethlehem.  Here’s a 30 min video of them being interviewed for 15 min and then performing for 15 min.  If you don’t have 30 min, take the time to at least skip to the middle and check out one of their songs.

Pittsburgh Pulse presents Dethlehem

It’s done!

My face melted.

This is awesome, it kind of dawns on you how sweet and substantial the lyrics are.

Edit: I also just noticed YouTube put an ugly search at the top of this embed on my blog on TomMannino.com/blog… do you see it?

So I figured I’d better sit down and write some stuff out now or I’ll never do it.  So now, stream of consciousness.

The first night, Thursday to Friday, I didn’t sleep a wink.  I was really nervous and excited.  Silly stuff, like wondering if people were going to ask questions I couldn’t answer, or if nobody would care about our booth or anything.  I had a few interviews with media outlets planned and I was of course a bit nervous about those, as they would technically be my first official ones.  I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, etc etc.

This weekend was amazing.

I lost my voice by the middle of the second day.  We were next to a very loud Intel booth, and they would randomly do stupid crap and yell crap on their PA system, so I’d be in the middle of the demo and have to talk over them.

My friend made me this magic potion that was the juice from two lemons and some honey.  It burned to drink with lemony power but within literally 45 min my throat felt tons better.  It was almost unreal how well it worked.  I tried it a second time the second night and it totally helped again.

My friends and co-workers who are made and are making the drive back and forth to Washington with the booth and whatnot are amazing.  They are the MVPs of the weekend for busting their butts so hard.

I have lots more to talk about but I need to sleep.  Will possibly document more adventures soon.

Imogen Heap makes music. She keeps a video blog. She shows off her creative process. It’s so amazing to see the nitty gritty of it.

Also she doesn’t stop talking for 10 minutes straight. I relate to her on a personal level and have an internet crush on her. It doesn’t help that her music is awesome.