Like Storify, but video

The Occupy movement is, it sometimes seems, everywhere and inescapable. Whether you're tweeting, watching the evening news, or merely walking through a particular section downtown in many major cities, you're bound to hear something about the 99% and their criticisms of modern financial and government institutions.

Lacking any real education with regards to economics and banking systems, I find myself unable to weigh in either in favor of or against the Occupiers. I do, however, support without question the right of American citizens to publicly assemble and voice their concerns and opinions without fear of oppression or violent aggression.

Assigned to make a remix video for my Creating Digital Media class, and with the recent police violence at Occupy protests in mind, I made this video, a cut up audio and video footage gleaned mostly from YouTube. And while it's a much more visually-oriented piece, it occurs to me now that my video-making process was really not so different from assembling a Storify - sourcing information, cutting it up, rearranging it as you see fit to say something meaningful. And when you think about it, Storifying is just classic storytelling via a different medium; so really, remix is at the heart of all storytelling.

In the Face of Death

By now you've no doubt ascertained my love of Christopher Hitchens and his writing. At the risk of boring you once more, I wanted to share this new article he wrote for January 2012 issue Vanity Fair. In it, he deconstructs the saying "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger," by analyzing its source (likely Nietzche, who Hitchens largely dislikes, it seems) while framing the whole thing within the context of his own battle with esophageal cancer and the necessary radiation and chemo treatments. The entire article is fascinating, but it was this paragraph near the end that struck me as particularly poignant:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I hope to never find myself in the painful situation that Hitchens now does, save for the desperate need to write and speak in order to properly live.

This Western Pennsylvania Life

I adore Ira Glass/NPR's This American Life program (when I remember to set aside 40-60 minutes to listen, that is.) If you ever need a fascinating look at people, flavored with a healthy dose of wit and whimsy, you couldn't do better the "show presented in three acts."

A while back, some friends and I decided to take a road trip to the great state of Kentucky, which was equally as fun as the drive was long. To help pass the time, my good friend Charles came prepared with a bevy of TAL podcast episodes on his iPod so we could listen in the car. We put this one on somewhere in Ohio, and it lasted us through the Pennsylvania border and a good bit of the way back to Pittsburgh. Never before has a public broadcast program made me more depressed or angry.

It's the perfect combination of fact finding and narrative-driven storytelling, and the fact that it hits so close to home makes it all the more compelling. To hear the interviews of people who live within a hundred miles away, and how adversely their lives have been effected by the Marcellus Shale drilling is devastating. Hearing about how Range Resources strong-armed local communities into adopting the company's policies is infuriating.

This is my favorite TIL episode, and I'm not sure I have the stomach to listen to it again.

Bonus: a diagram of how the drilling/hydrofracturing process works

Neil Gaiman and Henry Jenkins

I recently found this video of a conversation between author Neil Gaiman and American media scholar Henry Jenkins. In particular, I think the very first discussion question is fascinating, because it's about how an audience interacts with author's work when it comes in several different forms of media. Gaiman, for example, makes movies and comic books in addition to writing prose. In the battle to get comics the same recognition and respect as other art forms, it's nice to hear someone who does both say, "Hey, the comic is just as good. You'll get that same peculiar kind of buzz."




Bonus interesting point - According to Gaiman, there are a number of people who only read his blog, and none of his other written works.

Tumblr

Here's my tumblr on Chirstopher Hitchens - A Hitch in the Plan

Storify (disaster)

Here's the early draft of my Storify. Due to Storify's technical issues, none of my organizing/editing/most of my work saved, despite repeated clicking of the save button :(

Storify after the jump:

Byliner Follows

Some people I'm following on Byliner.com:

1.) Bill Donahue - When I logged into Byliner this morning, Bill's recent story for Wired, "6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission" was on the lineup of current new stories. Well, I love space, so obviously I clicked on it. It's great, and I figured if this is the kind of stuff he writes about, I definitely want to read more. Hence, the follow.

2.) Christopher Hitchens - I'm pretty sure I've talked about Hitchens a bit before. I really admire his journalistic work in addition to his more opinionated essays. Currently, he published pretty regularly for Slate in his column "Fighting Words"; it's usually about current events in world politics - like the recent flotilla to Israel/Gaza, or the United States' escalating drone war in Pakistan. Hitchens helps keep me informed about the wider world, and subscribing to him on Byliner reminds me when he publishes new material.

3.) Stephen Jay Gould - The only one of the three here who's no longer living (though Hitch isn't far behind), Gould was a famous well-known biologist who focused on the field of evolutionary biology. He proposed the concept that if the course of evolution were to replay itself, it almost certainly wouldn't turn out the same way again. As famous as Gould is for his work in science, he's almost as popular for his essays; I recently read an excerpt and decided I wanted to read further, so I subscribed on Byliner to help me find more.