lou suSi’s posterous bloggings

i just bumped across this talk from Jesse James Garrett and i think i just love everything about it ... he breaks it all open ... not just humming along for the sake of that 'feel good' vibe people might have wanted at the end of the 10 year IA Summit ... Garrett really rips in to bring us all to the next level ... check it out

10th Annual IA Summit Closing Plenary - Jesse James Garrett from Chris Pallé on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

Shep Bush recently asked folks on LinkedIn 'In screenwriting, does the Hero have to be a leader?'

interesting question ... and one that i needed to answer

as much as the post pertained to the 'ani-jobs' LinkedIn Group called Animation and Film Jobs, i wanted to answer in a more general, life-oriented sense ... specifically siting certain movie characterizations and examples to point out the answer here is definitley 'no'

here's my answer

The 'hero' of a story does not need to be a leader. I guess this greatly depends on your definition of 'hero', but I am thinking of the main character or the primary target of the film or camerawork.

Although the hero or main character does not need to be a leader, as passive watchers of a film, we are following that person and therefore they can oftentimes seem like a leader.

I hope that Pee-wee Herman is not considered a leader when we watch 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure'.

The main character in '3 Colours: White' ... is he 'a leader'? We follow his life adventure. We're introduced to his world and his climb back into a productive and almost-happy life, but he is almost an anti-hero. A low movement in the symphony of life. An interesting character, but not a leader.

The characters in 'Ghost World' ... they're almost more like tour guides to a certain mindSet or vantagepoint of looking at the world. The tension comes about when the 2 friends begin to encounter other people in their town that have what most might consider a 'more normal' view of the world. Or at least a less imaginative way of seeing things. This movie is almost about absolutely nothing. And yet we follow the characters and empathize with one or the other girl in our own special way depending on which side of the fence we're standing.

And then, more famously ... 'Pulp Fiction'. Are these horrific gangsters 'leaders'? I feel there is SO much symbollic stuff going on in this movie ... the sort of 'difference between dogs and pigs' ... loveable pets vs filthy animals ... they too become our tourguides into a timeless swirling indecipherable world where the sacred and profane mingle and blur. But there are definitely no heroes here that I can see. And there is definitely a gigantic void in the realm of leadership.

And this concept ... a hero-less, leaderless environment ... this might be the state of the world today. So don't let them fool ya.

Ashton thinks this bug is funny

well, i'm not sure if he's actually 'in headlines' or anything ... but my vote for THE most annoying celebrity 'out there' is Ashton MF Kutcher ... that dude in the Nikon commercials is both my worst nightmare + craziest dream come true ... i just wanna step into that commercial + crack that camera up bigtime ... i only wish we're were still in grand old age of 35mm film 'cuz i'd rip that schtuff out + spill it all over the floor right in front of 'im

i liked him in That 70s Show ... but chr!st + gawed almighty, someone gong that b!tch outta here please ... somebody shave me

i took a trip out to New York City this past weekend to attend 2 seminars offered through Steve Hoftstetter’s Comedy Soapbox … both courses focused on helping comedians get serious about their work from both the business and web aspects of the industry …

a lot of fantastic advice about brand and behavior … good professional advice that anyone ‘out there’ could use for any profession … i don’t want to reveal too much here or get down into the dirt of what us comedians need to go through to make an honest living and get ahead ( laugh ), but i do need to describe an amazing event that i got to witness immediately following the 4 hours of expert insight and suggestions coming from the comedic and business mind of Hoftstetter

after we all learned the deep dark secrets Steve had to share with us … we exchanged kind salutations, business cards and shared an elevator ride descent of 16 flights back down to the New York City streets … some banter and goodbyes and then, standing still and looking up and down the sidewalk i watched the comedians, large and small, men and women each with their own demographically diverse backgrounds, heritage, life experiences and sense of funny fashion … i got to see the comedians walk off into the afternoon armed with this newfound knowledge to help better their careers and help bring joy and laughter to people all around the world ( but mostly in the United States )

it was an inspiring vision … an incredible feeling to think of our afternoon union in the sky … to get the lowdown from a selfless professional in the industry … we drank in his knowledge and advice and now we all bring this insight out into the world as we aim to kill audiences far and wide … i felt a joy, a certain powerful sense of a dispersed community, a pride and happiness … and i laughed a little to myself as i headed off into the slight drizzle and crisp air

related links
http://comedysoapbox.com/
http://stevehofstetter.com/

i just saw this amazing Facebook Note posted by my good friend John Biebel ... Salem 'Witches' ... here is his original note and a very cyberSurreally crafted response ... see what you think ...

John posted: Salem 'Witches' on October 12 at 7:16am

OK, maybe someone can help me out here... for all those people fascinated by the famous Salem Witches of the 17th century, what's your opinion - were they witches?

It gets confusing since there are so many practicing witches active today in Salem. Do these modern witches stand by the Salem witches and say 'yes, they were witches and we support them'? It kinda doesn't make sense since the whole controversy is that they were wrongfully accused and therefore innocent victims of a rush to judgement. It is MORE likely that these women WEREN'T witches, and just scapegoats for an over-zealous puritan community.

So... why do modern witches flock to this place, then? It would seem to be a relic that represents the evils and sins of man's cruelty to itself...

One would have to gather, then, that those who believe there is special power in Salem DO believe that the 17th century witches WERE in fact actual witches, and that their sickness, convulsions and visions (aparently Satanic) were legitimate and to be emulated and applauded... but wait: is this the kind of witchery that they're supporting? In order to believe that these women were witches but MISUNDERSTOOD witches, well, that's asking us to believe HALF of the history of Salem, and toss the other half out (i.e., yes they were witches BUT they were not EVIL witches, as the assorted townsfolk said they were...)

Wait - this doesn't make sense, especially for those witches now who practice 'storefront' witchery of White Magic, and who are trying desperately to legitimize Magic as authentic.

Can someone explain this inherent contradiction?
Or is it simply that Salem is a nice historic old New England town where people like to hang out and buy love potion candles?

... and then on October 13 at 5:07 am I posted ...

I think the answer actually has something to do with the neighboring township of Danvers ( or as I say it, somewhat jokingly and somewhat w/ seriour New Englandesian cant ... Danviz ) ... Danvers was originally part of Salem and broke off following the horribly bad kamric energetics following the Salem Witch Trials ( or at least this is how I am recalling how the story goes ) ... the strangest part of all of this is that Danvers ( and Peabody ... aka Peeb'dy ) legend has it such that early Wiccans that fled from Great Britain to The New Land were actually Satanistically blessed by frequent meetings with The Greys ... oftentimes, real practicing 'witches' would wander off into the thick wooded patches of the now-Danvers-area forestScape and meet with The Greys and discuss potential peaceful union ( and sometimes have intergalactic bacchanalian festivals out in nature ) of the human race with these pristine and oft misunderstood otherBeings ... husbands, boyfriends and other curious ( and lustful ) men that lurked a bit along the periphery were so wrought with jealousy that they eventually brought the news of these bizarre events back to the Salem PD and there began the party raids and eventual arrests of numerous Wiccan women in the area, thus starting a wave of suspicious jailings and trials that came to be known as The Salem Witch Trials

horrible stuff

the potential promise for intergalactic union and peace was still thick in the air during the torturous questionings and imprisonment of a fairly innocent bunch of women ( and men, although the marketing of The SWTs tends to leave the male element out ... I get concerned, as a man, to think our society is so terribly frightened by the penis ... so much so as to only have it visually portrayed { or represented } in underground cinematographic film circuits of pornography ... why is it we can see breast and ass, but never { or rarely } a prick? And then why, I need to know, is it only depicted { or depricked dead } in its flaccid and sad hangning state and never in its vanglorious 'awake and ready' mode of play? hmmmm? hmmmmmmMmmMMmM? ) that came to be known as The Salem Witch Trials

and the women never uttered a word of their provocative interracial relations in the woods ... why would that be, one might ask? well, perhaps for the very same reason the government hides some of the debris from September 11 ( for further forensic investigation and study ) in hangers and other large mysterious warehouses like the ones found out off of 495 in Littleton ... do a little investigative reporting ... they won't let you know what's in there ... they won't even entertain the notion of being somewhat 'matter of fact' about what is being covered up there, how they can manipulate and hide the truth behind such an event ... very mysterious

well, at a certain point the ones that were capable of keeping the deeper secrets of these orgies were rewarded by some of the upper crust of Danvers ... they were given quaint shoppes and told how to help market the event in a more positive light ( as if early New England's pre-echo of waterboarding and other torturous 'freedom preservation' activities could ever truly be spun w/ threads of positive gold ) ... how to turn the horrible, horrible burnings, drownings and mutilation of those 13 teenage women into something more sublimely menstrual and fun ... nothing, mind you, to celebrate the wonderful 'Big O' activity that really went down in the furtive forests of 'Salem' as we know it today ... that would perhaps anthropromorphize The Greys a bit too much for our liking ( they are always depicted as these tall and rather cold somewhat sterile heady beings ... great mystics from the sky ... their visits here showing influence in some of the local nomenclaature ... Mystic River Parkway ... Ayer ... Mass MoCA ... iHOP ... and perhaps the most famous, Pizza Hut ( this is more of a visualization ... the roof and major logo brand depicting the now overGeneralized shape of their craft ) ) yes, we like to depict 'them' as being emotionless and remote ala The Vulcans from the original Star Trek television series ... the aliens are awkward, strange 'others' that are 'out there' among us

just like any other realm of design, you do not necessarily need to start thinking of the Total eXperience Design right from day 1

let's say you start off designing a campaign or concept from a pure print standpoint at first ... you have brochureware, business cards, flyers, posters, books, periodicals or any microSet of these items from the realm of paper and physically printed work ... you can easily take your high resolution and vector-drawn artwork and interpolate that into the realm of onScreen eXperience ( oSX or whatever else you might personally call it ... most might say uX for user eXperience, but i think i prefer the implied 'operating System' in this oSX tla* ... there is also an nearReference to 'ossification' in the oS part of the tla which definitely holds some resonance to end deliverables like wireframes and other IA documents that set up the backbone for later rounds of 'skinning' or visual design treatment ) ... that works out nicely, right?

and then from high resolution to low resolution ( for onScreen ) to no resolution ( for mobile or text-based interpretation of the original print to web to text ), that's another easy degradation ... and we all know it could work in the reverse as well ( but would be a LOT more efficient having vector and high rez brand elements from the first ), there just may need to be some sort of reCreation to make the no to low to high rez translation possible

these are still playing in the realm of what i would consider relatively flat media ... sure, there can be an element of time and space in both onScreen and onDevice eXperience design, but there is an almost near-predictablity whenever the backend relies on database technology ( as opposed to a less predictable system of people or performers )

here is another way to extend the experience design

let's say you hand out training materials and businessCards ( other paperWare as well ) and after a period of rehearsal and behaviorSetting event-based sessions your salesForce or performance militia is then allowed to carry out some sort of activity 'out there' in both the real world and online ... these performers ( salesFolk, whatever ) can then use tools such as databases and preScripted materials ( corporate or not ) to act on the behalf of an organization to work toward achieving a goal ... a truly dynamic system ... one that is a lot more improvisational and a LOT less predictable than one that uses a pre-programmed mathematical set of algorithms to perform a task ( a Javascript randomizer, perhaps, serves up 1 of 20 different animated gifs ... or maybe there is a semantic web microApplication or adServer that grabs the historical online trends of a user and serves up some content or graphic that proves to be more relevant to the user as they navigate a system ... if you're a heterosexual woman, maybe the dynamic system serves up the image of a strapping, young poolboy w/ the tagline ... 'Hey Baby, time for some fun' ... and then maybe if you're a tree in the autumntime, maybe a block of text gets served up instead to describe the benefits of dropping acorns to not only propagate the species but also to help a squirrel family survive through the upcoming brutal winter squalls approaching )

as an example ... the totally random, packeted and human-chaotic approach Al Qaeda implemented might best explain the difficulty, perhaps, in properly tracking and putting a stop to the young pilot students in Florida prior to the 911 attacks ... i personally believe, with the advent of satellite spy systems and other superCool stealth tracking the US government utilizes, that there is no way they could NOT have known, to some degree, that there was at least going to be some sort of mass hijacking in the skies above and about NYC ... maybe the pure evil inside of a system of human beings cannot be tracked or measured by any device or team of watchers ... or maybe all data was available to certain departments or individuals tracking the behavior patterns of these suspicious foreign agents but there was a failure to go beyond the numeric, patternistic analysis and interpret the criss-cross addition and multiplication of all the components to fully realize the truth and intention behind the efforts of the student internationals suddenly interested in 'learning to fly' ... but the human element here, in this particular system design, that human element was either the excuse behind non-prevention or acted as an insanely powerful subterfuge to the antiSystem ( i guess system and antiSystem can be purely a matter of perspectavity ... from the US standpoint, of course, we were protecting the system of Democracy { or Capitalistic Consumerism from the purely financiofactual societal analysis filter } and the antiSystem would be the terrorists, no matter from where or whence, from the era of the great Lewinsky and onward into the future forever and evermore )

the ultimate dynamic systems need to not only involve humans as the end-user | viewer | participant, but should also exploit the power of human performance within the system to help steer the processes from within the system

could robots effectively be programmed to sell Oracle products?

let's say you could completely emulate a human voice, the inflection and accent of a salesperson or performer ( i keep saying performer as my real interest, my intentions are not meant for real market-effective purposes at all but perhaps, indeed, for the forces that influence the opposite inflexion when so deserved ) ... could all of the circumstances behind a human conversation between client and representative be accounted for to anticipate every thread and potential for exception or bargaining? i don't think so ... 

my theory is that life is a dynamic system ... and that people, being the users of the system, need an equivalent human component within the system to create the ultimate dynamic set of status and interactivity ...

if we started with a performance piece, a play perhaps ... how could that experience be extended? maybe the brochureWare, the artifacts that will survive the live experience, these items could be designed to help brand the event and serve as a means to resuscitate the memory of the original live performance ( its key elements, narrative and nuances ) in the mind of the concertGoer or theatreGoer ... maybe there are more intential 'takeaways' distributed to the audience ( Walter Sickert and The Army of Broken Toys typically distribute little 'toy' noisemakers for cued audience participation at critical shock and emphasis points in their theatricalmusical event-based concerts and shows ... Crank Sturgeon quite frequently uses olfactory sensation to create a bit of spacial memory discordance that heightens my own post-event discourse and reflections of his noise performance, sound art and danceworks { he might throw freshly raked leaves about the space or burn fabric inside a toaster oven, each producing a unique and memorable nasal-based brand for his performative episodic installations } ) ... or perhaps the performance itself purposely begins to extend beyond the stageSpace ... maybe there are faux-protestations being carried out in a semi-unoffcial manner to heighten the senses of the audience as they encounter the rage and discontent of this pre-performative 'appetizer' tasting of what the intended subject matter could include ... more and more literary experiences ( or at least fictional and written experiences ) are being augmented with peripheral online experiences that might express the opinions of just one character from the book using MySpace, Facebook or other pretended social web experiences to deepen the mythological aura and fictionSpace surrounding the 'real work' ... Sasha Baron Cohen's 'Brüno' movie had several promotional website extensions that helped heighten not only the hype but also the riduculous personality and parody that is obviously at the core of what Cohen does ... 

not every design needs this sort of extension

but in thinking about Total eXperience Design potential for a campaign, activity or product it can be very helpful to consider the static, temporal, algorithmic and ultimately human ( chaotic or concordance-reactive ) elements to include for the most effective txd ... to consider, perhaps, not only the user expereince as seen from the side of the target audience but also from the vantagepoint of the targeting user participant in the system

*tla = three-letter acronym

Image via Wikipedia

recently ERP/PLM Administrator at NDS Surgical Imaging Chris Ciraulo asked the following question up on LinkedIn Answers ...

What would your monument be?

The Pyramids of Egypt, the Roman Colleseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China...

If you were given the task of creating a new monument to stand the test of time and unlimited resources, what would it be and where would you put it? Be creative!

As much as I know my recent thoughtworks veer toward nature ... both natural elements from the woods and from the oceans ... items like pinecones and seashells, acorns and sea-polished stones ... I was nicely surprised by my answer to Chris' question ( see below ) :

the willow heart of human hope

I would create a concrete tree ... a very large tree ... concrete or marble ... some sort of stone ... leaves and all ... a tree of North America ... lights, there would be lights inside the canopy of the tree ... maybe a huge willow tree ... something you could go into and witness together with others ... you could look up into it and it would be like an internal constellation of sorts ... it would represent the human heart of hope ... light ... joy ...

It would represent enlightenment and protection. Shelter. Natural shelter. The sort of comfort you can only feel when embraced in the arms of nature Herself.

Not the tree that they nailed Jesus Christ to. Not the tree of eternal suffering. Suffering of the child. No, no ... nothing of the sort.

The tree ... this natural willow heart of human hope ... she would stand alone, larger than life ... offering comfort ... the tree would have a halo. A tree that somehow achieved martyrdom ... a saintly status in the form of a weeping willow. Perhaps the tree Herself is also a fountain. A fountain tree of hope and light and trickling streams of joy ... warm water. A true symbol of growth and healing. Growth, healing and comfort.

what's the big idea

as part of my studies in communication design and dynamic media at The Dynamic Media institute at MassArt in Boston i spent the best part of the first year in the program exploring and rediscovering a lot of subject matter i am particularly passionate about ... the second semester included a continuation of The DMI's 'Design Seminar' ... and in this course my classmates and i got to use mindmapping, automatic writing and other techniques to delve into the realms we might consider as the focus for our eventual thesis work in design

the program is utterly amazing ... and i highly recommend anyone that is truly interested in current trends in technology, communication, expressive arts and creativity and the future of humanity come to the program and at least audit a course ... i'm sure that if you stop in you will witness something that you may not find anywhere else in the world ... an international and interdisciplinary union of personality and expertise all brought together for the sole purpose of contributing to the future ... contributing to the future of design thought and media experience

of course, this hubPage is not an advertisement for the program ... i am just excited about the coursework and it is only through my own participation that i bumped across this theory ... the theory that serves as the primary focus of this hubPage | blog | what have you

and that focus, my friends, is the concept of Total eXperience Design

so, for now ... more digression and background on my studies ... only a slight delay ( be patient ), i promise

back to Design Seminar 2 ... as part of the coursework w/ DS2 the entire class participated in a community blog to explore areas of interest and help each of us discover our passions in this space ... w/ each new blogPost, students were then expected to make comments on each other's writings ... and the funny thing that came out of that particular part of the exercise, at least for me, was each comment i posted, each attempt i made to give my own perspective to someone else's perspective ... each comment seemed to help both parties involved ... commenting helped me deepen and clarify my own thoughts as well as offer up some valuable thought and consideration for my classmate ... a truly valuable and unique exercise in community, thinking and sharing

the results of my second semester ... well, i developed a preliminary thesis proposal ... or i almost developed a preliminary thesis proposal ... i think that my final ( or nearFinal ) presentation just put a LOT of ideas 'out there' ... i was concerned about the loss of texture as we move from media in realSpace into increasingly more virtual expressive spaces ...

i also seemed very curious about the areas between each artform or each realm of design communication ( some might call these channels ) and i called this betweenSpace ...

translation, as somewhat related to the loss of texture through virtualization, but more importantly, literal translation and the gigantic and ofttimes humorous, disservice word-to-word machine-like translation can do for language, this was also important to me and my thesis ... you cannot truly translate a poem, right? something gets lost ... either the rhythm, the nonsense, some of the meaning, i mean ... there are good translations of a poem on the page, i'm sure ... but no matter what it seems we lose something along the way ( and that might be poetic texture ) ... i would advocate for interpretation over translation any day a the week ...watching the TED Talk by Evelyn Glennie 'How to listen to music with your whole body' incredibly demonstrates, at one point, the important human difference between translation and interpretation ... i hope to promote interpretation and to ridicule mere, robotic translation through some of my work

and i also knew that i was interested in doing unusual things with technology ... that i wanted to create experiences that would make people question things or wonder if the experience they just had could even have been real

in some of my last slides ... the last points of my final presentation summarized the key points in my areas of interest ... and in the mix was the term 'cyberSurreal' ... the professor leading the class ( and the program ) Jan Kubasiewicz asked if the term cyberSurreal was my own invention, and frankly, i am not sure where it came from ( i had, in fact, just invented this term as i frequently mash words together w/ a little camelCasing due to my exposure and practice with code ), but as soon as he began to ask everything seemed to make sense

i think i needed to give myself permission ... it took me a year to unwind from the kind of corporate containership my professional existence shackled to me for years ... i have had to live as a man in pieces for more than a decade ... someone that needed to, for survival in an office ( of all places ) setting, someone that needed to sequester huge chunks of important stuff away because the establishment, the cSuite, whatever you want to call it, finds the real me ( the entire bag of thought ) a little too scary for the workplace ... i don't know, it could be my own doing really ... i could be assuming that the whole package is 'too much' for the workplace ... but i don't think i imposed these silos upon myself ... this siloing ...

so it took me a year to admit to myself i was interested in cyberSurrealism ... the extension of the original movement of Surrealism and all of its predecessing and postdecessing movements back and forth, into and out of the virutal and actual systems we all must live with, in, around ... with at least part of cyberSurrealism i want to explore life as a living prototype ... a sort of found prototype ... as a performer ( and as a world citizen that needs to live in this world we were given ... this hand-me-down world ) i will become a sort of usability practitioner of the world and its many systems as a found, living prototype ... and from here on in it is my job to test the system and find ways to improve it

a more grand way of saying this is ... through the international movement of cyberSurrealism i will act as a usability practitioner to test the world as a found, living prototype and then find areas of potential improvement and suggest ways to change the world ... i hope to suggest unusual ways of solving huge problems by looking at things from a slightly different angle ( as influenced by our 'Murray' project in Design Studio 2 with Joseph Quackenbush,see the New Yorker article 'Million Dollar Murray' by Malcolm 'Tipping Point' Gladwell ) or by using the betweenSpace as a place of leverage ... and, from a more Surreal standpoint and one that may be more literary or poetic, i am seeking poetic justice in the world through my research, prototyping and exploration of these concepts ... i hope to live my life as much like a poem personified as Billy Barnum does ... to seek those moments of poetry that cannot be merely translated or explained but can only be appreciated through living, through witnessing, through direct experience of that poetic moment

and that lead us to Total eXperience Design

i have many theories brewing about this topic of Total eXperience Design ... i heard an excellent recent talk about multi-channel marketing campaigns, which seems to potentially be one flavor of what i am proposing to the world ... but TXD is a bit different, especially when looked at through the lens of cyberSurrealism

based on Wagner's concepts of gesamtkunstwerk or 'The Total Artwork' ... Total eXperience Design would take a user-centered set of considerations ( maybe even a UCD approach, but it might depend on the piece ) to design everything ... the entire experience ... to take all sense into consideration ... to take the temporal nature of the particular piece into consideration ... to think about the impression the piece leaves w/ the listener | viewer | participant ... the TXD aftertaste, if you will ... and to think about the artifacts or take-aways that both the user and the world will have following the existence of the TXD piece in question or on display

how many times ... how many times have i been to a performance, seen incredible work, live sound and theatricality ... event-based experience ... and then, in the end, the piece unintentionally ( without TXD consideration ) lives on only in the mind ( and conversation ) of the audience ... in other words, adequate and important documentation and deliverables were never considered ... the focus is so much on getting up on stage, using this or that technology, wearing this or that article of clothing, and yet there is no video or audio capture of the event to help the people of the future ( or even of the present ) understand or see the vision you created

if this were intentionally part of the plan, cool ... not a big deal to document a rock show, perhaps ... and that is fine ... we can't have a screenCapture of every single moment in lifenow, can we?

but we should at least, as artists and designers, consider the afterlife of a project or event ... is there an item we would want to give the viewer | participant to help them better understand the intended meaning of the piece? to understand it after the show, after the opening? or to maybe read a year from now and in deeper yet delayed reflection suddenly understand the work in a different light? 

or maybe it is what it is and that’s that ... that would be fine as well ... just be considerate ... consider the audience, the participant, the viewer, the user, the audience ... and think about what you would want them to say, how you want them to talk about your work, how you hope they understand and speak about the content from a variety of levels

but we can think about TXD as gesamtkunstwerk augmented by the latest art and technology movements

TXD = g+DM ( gesamtkunstwerk + dynamic media )

these are my preliminary ideas about Total eXperience Design

{ original post on the official TXD HubPage }

so, yeah ... heh heh heh ... summer's wrappin' up quick now, aint' it ;]

here's what went down + what we learn from it alL

july 3 | my birthday ... i turned 40 this year

july 6 | Monster let me go

july 6 | my first game a golf ever ... seriously

july 7 | i start networking like a mnthafncka

july 14 | some amazing friends from Monster give me a send-off party

july 27 | we golf again ... my second time golfing ever ... no really!

july 30 | Carol, Lexi, Maceo + i go to Storyland for the day

july 30 | Strange voicemail from a good friend

july 31 | Jelly@Betahouse

july 31 | Return call to a good friend | Send a thread with some words of encouragement and inspiration to the old team

july 31 | Call my friend to make sure everything is now resolved, and you know what? It is! My words of advice, encouragement and inspiration in response seem to really stop the nonsense ... Cool

august 3 | I start up work at a brand new company called Dimdim

august 19 | Boston Harbor Odyssey Cruise with Dimdim ... such a friendly new culture, and a great way for my family to meet the team and the larger family at Dimdim

august 19 | i get an interesting email from a 'famous' brand with a document to read, but don't even know it yet

august 20 | i see the email and read the attached PDF document

august 20 | i begin to ask friends, colleagues, enemies + strangers for advice about this interesting correspondence and the attached document

august 20 | i make a decision that i think is truly smart, unique + innovative ... truly 'lou suSi' ... good to be back on my game now, ain't it?

august 20 | start to brainstorm on concepts for my new webinar series

august 20 | i ponder whether this entire episode could become part of my graduate thesis research + writing for my MFA ... hmmmMMmmMMmmm? yeah, it could

august 21 | i continue to ask people for advice about this horrible situation ... not so sure who it is more horrible for though, ya know?

august 22 | still need to get as much advice as possible

august 23 | more advice please, thanks

august 24 | just a little more advice, thanks ... and now ...

august 24 | i write + send a 6 page letter of response with an attached thread of correspondence that seemed to cause some dismay earlier on in this very vague chronology of retardedness

august 24 | i call the company to get confirmation that my letter, my requested response was received

august 24 | The company gets back to me, round 2 ... done!

So, 1 thing I learned ... don't worry about this stuff. Crazy distractions in life happen all the time. And its not your fault, not due to your relative 'goodness' or 'badness' in the world

Another thing ... collect artifacts. Yep! Take screenshots of every interaction, collect all documentation, build your story ( while some are building a case, others start to have an interesting story to tell, right? ) ... its fun, easy and free! So, why not take advantage of living each moment in life as it happens?

And another thing ... use the potentially annoying events that come your way as a means to be more creative and expressive. This is inspiring activity. You learn more + more about the world and the 'famous' brands we choose to use or not use. If you are asked to do something, by all means try to accomodate that request. Its the decent thing to do. But remember, try to push it a bit further. Be extra accomodating. Give them all they hoped and wished for ... but give 'em that extra mile, the whole ten yards, really give it them!

And 1 last note my friend and frenemies ... have fun! Just be playful. You only live once. Sure, the human lifespan is now at least 3 times as long as it would be without chemicals, tools, weapons and 'civilized' society as we know it ( not sure we love it though, right? BC would have asked us all, 'Define civilized' ). We're lucky. We're alive. We win! And we have fun doing it! THAT's what I'm fnckin' talking about!

Do it for love

Do it for fun

Do it for what you know in your heart, mind, body and soul is the right thing to do

And remember, a little karma goes a long way ... send some karma t'day ;]