I had fun working on the Vlogging entry yesterday, kept going back and editing it, also looking at more of the vlog entries I found online. I think they call an entry a “bite.” Many of them are true art.

Searching wider, I found that some people actually video themselves talking about the news like anchormen (it seems to be mostly men that do this)! Help!

When, like, Charlene Rule (link to a MOV) can do so much more just by waving her hands over the camera. Or Mica (link to a MOV) can capture the true pathos of being alive in a quick grab of a few minutes of an unappy friend's face in a bar.

Wonderfully skewed reflections of the world. Mind puddles. (In this photo below that I took yesterday, the water's on top, I have a mirroring theme in todays 3 pictures.)

You’d think that on a day when I blog so much, I wouldn’t get much “real” writing done. But somehow I did. I ran out to the Great Bear coffeeshop with my laptop (which, thank God, isn’t wirelessly connected) and sketched a scene of Bela spending a night in jail with Thuggee and Naz for the Washer Drop incident. And later Sylvia and I went for a walk.

I often think of the painting metaphor when writing. I mean first there’s the architectural thing of figuring out the arc of the novel. And then, faced with each chapter, figuring out the sequence of scenes. And when it’s time to write a scene, I tend to write something pretty rapidly, like a sketch or underpainting. Fast is good, since one is always anxious, faced with the blank page. And then I go over it, adding things, intensifying, fractalizing.

Trees have a ramifying structure underground just like they do above ground, I took a picture of the roots of this one big oak on a cliff near my house yesterday.

I imagine good videos are built up slow like paintings or stories, using the editing software. Most of the more interesting vlog bites are indeed edited. But now and then there’s a simple unedited reality take that’s perfect. The world does give us things for the taking.

Here’s where the other approach kicks in, the photographer’s eye thing of just seeing the artistic event and having the craft to capture it intact. Maybe here, it’s the seeing that’s the hard part. Seeing, and going back again and again to try and get the picture. The successive photos as drafts.

But even in photography, you do PhotoShop to make it look better. You can’t quite do the spontaneous grab with text, although, yeah, you can just natter on without editing. Oh, yeah, and you can collage in passages that you find in the world.

Still thinking about the autovideo thing that my character’s “vlog ring” does. There’s some smart software that breaks it into bites, aims the viewpoint at the loudest noise (like a dog hearing something), and speech-recognizes some words for the title.

But any automatic art pales, at least so far. Art is a class four fractal computation informed by emotion. We can always recognize it at a glance.

Thanks, dear readers, for all the comments!

As Marshall from Scandanavia says, “Myrff Myrff… The sound of a happy pig.”

***

I’m writing about vlogging (video blogging) in my novel Mathematicians in Love. At first I half-thought I was making this word up, but I checked on Google and it’s real. Indeed, I spent a fair amount of time yesterday looking at vlogger sites. Three that I looked at are:

Hello by Mica

This is Vlog by Shannon Noble

Scratch Video by Charlene

And these sites have endlessly more links to further vlogs.

I watched a couple of vlogs made at VloggerCon, which was in NYC last week. A woman named Chris speaks of “database cinema.” Mica talks about the paradox of finally getting to meet the people you interact with online, but since you’re a vlogger, you’re still looking at them on a screen, to wit, the viewscreen of your videocam.

***

Tech note: Most vloggers use the QuickTime *.MOV format for their videos as QuickTime is readily available and allows for a wide range of compression settings.

If you want to post vlogs, you pretty much want to pay Apple $30 to activate the editing feature of your QuickTime viewer, and then you can load a big MPEG and save it as a MOV using various compression options.]

***

I keep updating this blog entry as I keep tyring to vlog something. I mpegged a scene with my little SONY Cybershot DSC-T1 pocket camera, as a 17 Meg MPG, and have been tyring to use QuickTime Pro to make it into a tiny MOV. This had turned into an endless nightmare with no happy ending in sight. I figured out how to to compress to a small MPEG 4 format less than a Meg, but then the audio gets lost, and I can't figure out how to get it back. Also, now my Monkeybrains memory is full, and I can't even upload the tiny-ass less than a meg MPEG 4 MOV file I mande. Oh, fuck it, time for my spring break (2/8/2005). Hats off to the vloggers.

***

Regarding my fictional imaginings of vlogging, here’s a passage from the novel. Our hero Bela has spent the day with a woman named Alma, and now they’re having dinner with Bela’s crazy mathematician friend Paul and with Alma’s outspoken friend Leni. Leni runs a web channel with lots of vlog reports. The passage introduces a not-quite-here-yet notion I’d like to see: the vlog ring.

***

“He really is cute,” said Leni, looking at me. “I wish you’d vlogged yourself surfing with him today, Alma. That camera’s shockproof and waterproof, you know. I want to get some people to start vlogging everything they do. Real reality TV. I’m getting these special wearable cameras called vlog rings.”

“Vlogging?” said Paul. “That means video blogging?”

…

“Tell me more about the vlog ring,” I said.

“Just like it sounds,” said Leni. “You wear it on your finger, and it has a bulgy little fisheye lens that pulls in this hemispherical field of view. Looks kind of like those tacky rings they try and make you buy when you’re a senior in high-school? My first girlfriend actually wanted to give me one. Ugh.”

“Doesn’t a fisheye image look warped on the screen?” I asked. “Like those acid-freak-out TV commercials of your parents pushing their faces up against you? Have you done your homework, honey? Did you take your meds?”

“The users download some software that flattens out the image,” said Leni. “And since there’s so much visual information coming from the vlog rings, the users can vary their point of view. Like you’re following a person around and deciding what to look at. It’s the latest tech. And today I found a way to get some vlog rings very cheap. For free, really.”

…

“Look at this,” said Danny, pointing to his computer screen. It showed a video window surrounded by buttons and controls. The video showed me looking at the screen, slightly lagged.

As Danny moved his mouse around, the viewpoint changed; he could effectively look in any direction from the viewpoint of my vlog ring.

The screen bore the caption “The Crazy Mathematician” in its title bar. On the left side were some links, a search bar, and a clickable calendar-and-clock interface for jumping to my accumulating vlog stream. Buzz had a automated system that bookmarked highlights of the vlog, using pattern and speech recognition to figure out names for the bookmarks. Database cinema. The lead link was labeled “Washer Drop.”

…

“How much do you remember?” Lulu asked me in a quiet tone.

Images and sounds blossomed from Lulu's question. Jen3 screaming into the night. A tumbling washing machine, growing smaller as it fell, thudding onto the roof of the neighbor's SUV, the front left corner of the roof. A sharp bang decaying into a slower crunch, followed by the sparkly tinkle of the shattered windshield. The startled car’s alarm hooting like its outraged owner. Thuggee standing on the parapet, guffawing, rolling back his foreskin, pissing down at him. The incredibly prompt arrival of the squad cars with their red-yellow-blue flashers. My stumbling, careening evasion down the back stairs. My hand grabbing a last pitcher of beer. Danny hustling me into his room. Oblivion.

“Oh oh. Did I vlog the washer drop?”

***

Re. the anamorphic blog ring ware, there actually was some software like that a few years back, written by Eric Gullichsen and used for the home page of Tonga, but just now I can’t remember the name of it, or find a link to it, or raise Gullichsen who, last I heard, was working with a traveling circus ship in the South Pacific.

Regular reader of this blog Emil Rojas asks:

Question “I'm wondering why you don't allow responses on a per article basis on your blog like most blogs? Your blog is definitely more interesting then most, and it would be cool to see what people are thinking in response to the great stuff you are putting out. I think you would attract more readers if they could respond, after all most people just want to hear themselves talk :-)”

Answer I had the responses turned on for awhile, but there were very few of them, and it was bumming me out to look for them and find none. I kind of like just posting the blog and then forgetting about it, as opposed to hovering over it to see if there's any reaction.

In such situations I always remember the pigs at the Rutgers Agricultural School Farm that Sylvia and I would go look at when we were in grad school there. The pigs' food was placed into a little metal box with a slanting roof that they'd push up with their snout. So all day long the pigs are checking to see if there's food, and you're hearing this lonely clank of the all-too-empty food box. I think of those pigs when I check for physical mail in my metal mailbox, also when I check for non-existent email, or for comments — and there aren't any.

But, what the heck, I can turn the comments on for awhile, and just not worry about them. What a concept. Comments are now ACTIVATED!

[The Rutgers Ag Farm pigs in 1968]

Emil also asks:

Question “I'm also curious how big your readership is, and the number of responses would give some idea.”

Answer Thanks to the excellent support system of Monkeybrains, I know that in January, 2005, the site www.rudyrucker.com averaged some 6,000 hits per day, coming from about 400 vistors a day. (Each visitor produces some 15 hits as various images and style sheets are downloaded to build the visible pages.)

My most popular page is the blog, the second most popular is the notes on how I wrote my book As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, and third most popular is the page describing my forthcoming nonfiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

[Rudy at Rutgers in 1968.]

My mathematician/computer scientist friend Michael Beeson sends a link to a master page showing about a hundred neat graphical Java applets by ascended code-master Ken Perlin.

Fellow cyberpunk/dadaist SF writer John Shirley found a page of Hieronymus Bosch action figures.

And reader nicknamed Majcher found a site about a woman taking the first small steps towards the fully organic house-trees of Frek and the Elixir — she’s growing coat hangers!