12/27/2020, 03:08am Eastern Standard Time
Klaimco,
‘ A way 2 make a World… ’
Unit 2.2
Excuse my 3nglish iif I’ve spoken about this before. Know its been sprinkled (like 1 grain of blue sprinkle off a sprinkle cookie from Publix® [free4kidz0nly]).
But I kinda grew up on Spiderman Cartoon Maker. At the time I was maybe too young to even be on it or know it… it kinda taught me how to even use a computer as a tool.
It was an all free software that came with your computer when you bought a P*C. It was probably the only thing on my parents PC at the time. That & mind sweeper. Until my brothers got Command&Conquer at BestBuy & I downloaded FruityLoops off Napster & started making Rap, Techno, Jungle, Abstractions [(& never saved any or put any out) ohhh well].
Yet, this memory of sorts is kinda about that (the unsaved things you remember & want; like even want to just see for a little bit, or hold). But they are just memories U.C. some place behind your eye :::
Anyhow: Spiderman Cartoon Maker (I really really miss ya’). This piece of software enters my mind all the time. I keep waiting for a software advancement such as this. Where are you ? (Yet I’m hardly lookin’).
SMCSoftware…It makes you tell stories in a fun & easy way. This software almost defined how I tell stories & make things today. It was like the ultimate development. Cause in Middleschool art classes we didn’t really have them & creative writing classes: We didn’t really get those assignments.
So maybe it was just a natural way of exploring & making your own development; The comedy, The seriousness, The character building & everything; I think this was a place to develop your being as a human [through jokes/stories/characters/animation]. This software was a way of exploring. I wish I had all of these back. All the creations on it were so special. They almost were better than most kids drawings or movies. They had all the depth of diving into a real story. All the reach of really going to a place in your mind as a form of expression. I remember making them & then showing them to people & just like dying on the floor laughing at some of the things that were happening. Often even with the ones I didn’t make. It was so easy to make them. You were just fully in this great zone of inventing your own world.
Then, about the start of this year (a year ago) I ran into world4jack video pieces… & was watching all the new ones dropping all year. These feel like a completely refreshed version of this world that was being made using Spiderman Cartoon Maker software on my parents PC growing up. It feels way different stylistically & visually, & even the Audio & time period. But I was in awwwwe of these videos this year because they are so funny & great & totally FLASHHHHED my brain back to making stories & narratives using SCMWares.
World4jack I think you win the Peaces’’’ of the Year [from KC]. Thank you for making your creations & having the most ultimate fun while making them. Cause, these videos you are making are really great & almost define the year (at least on YT)… & kinda made me time warp back to places & spaces & making your own narratives in your own worlds in a software. Super 3xpressive. Thanks Again. & I also would like to thank all the people that made the SCMWare back in the day. You probably have no idea how many people & kids, & teenagers you inspired. I wish I could walk into a gallery space & see like hundreds of SCM creations being projected all at once. I wonder where all the ones I made went? Maybe into the abyss, but it fostered my imagination so much. Thanks so much. So many Thank Yous <3,
– B.N.
:0)
‘ Fluid Mechanix && the field of ALL_possibility ’
Unit 1.1
I grew up at the bottom of a cul-de-sac deep in a neighborhood at the end of a city sprawleddd out along a major thorough-fare, all strip malls and no center. This ' R0ckville Pike ' aka MD355 is 36.75 mi (59.14km) and stretches back to colonial times. In fact it in the 1800s it was used as a way to escape Washington D.C. during times of war and conflict. Why is that important? Well, because on 1 hand I spent my teenage years trying that escape path in reverse &&on the other hand this trail-turned-route-turned-road-turned-so-called-modern-society was forged originally by Native Americans (Accohannock; Assateague; Piscataway; Nause-Waiwash; Pocomoke; Youghiogheny, and probably others) &&as soon as you got beyond any neighborhood or development, it was alll deer-filled woods as far the eye could see or anyone had the time to walk.
This route, MD355, was a teleportation device. Along it ran all the buses and a metro line (Red) and the Amtrak/Acela&& freight lines to D.C. and Baltimore and far beyond. When you drove or walked or biked or rode the train/s and buses you could see all the relative speeds in which people were coming and going... where to &&where from?? I allways wondered even though I was also being ferried along MD355 for as long as I could remember.
A few more things,, I was never much of a destination person &&it allways seemed that without fully knowing what or where you're headed if your intent upon something different the doppler of the quest might fill itself in beyond any possible expectations along the way. As a kid my family never took vacations (time&money constraints), yet the few times we did go to say an amusement park I recall not really enjoying the parks at all but being really into reading a long book or playing gameboy in the car at nite with a tiny-light and the sound turned almost all the way down. The world of cheap &&sketchy motels with pre-historic ice machines, the stench of stale cigarettes which could not be lifted, and way-over chlorinated pools lit up in the evenings felt infinitely richer in backstory &&allways got my mind racing way more than any ride or attraction; as soon as we arrived @ those destinations I was already itching to leave.
When I was a bit older my dad told me off handedly about this strange writer – Richard Brautigan. It didn't make all that much sense what this writer was about, yet once I was able to get my hands on some of his short novels and poetry collections I was fully immersed in a kind of writing and poetry which I had never seen or heard of before...the tone and voice and characters and non-characters were all so much larger and more immense than what the author provided on the page... often time the pages were nearly empty yet you knew there was more and that that 'more' could be accessed without ever needing to be defined or spelled out!
I often used my dads work laptop extra-late into the evenings to read more about this person.. I learned he was a nominal if not outsider figure in a group called the San Francisco Diggers which sprung from a a local activist/theater/mime troupe... I spent countless hours on a website called The Digger Archives <diggers.org> my head was buzzing with ideas at the thought that any sort of counterculture such as this might have existed @ all &&then that someone would take the time and care all these years later to use the WWW to shape and transmit the materials and people and ideas into the present/future. No matter how far you clicked the pages kept going and information and images kept nesting and you could really get lost in there. 15+ years later the website is nearly identical to how it was back then and is still being slowly updated.
The Diggers were saying things like "FREE CITY/FREE STREET" and "TRIP WITHOUT A TICKET" and holding events like the ' The Invisible Circus ' and maintaining a guerrilla publishing element (COMM/CO) as well as free stores and free food,,
Like a cosmic-dart to the back of my mind I remember reading about a happening where they brought a 12sqft giant yellow frame to the intersection of Haight and Ashbury... They called it the ' Free Frame of Reference ' && handed out mini replicas of the yellow frame on lanyards to passersby insisting that people take the time to think and see for themselves... encouraging them to play and take back the streets as a public good for the improvement of all peoples everywhere. I was born decades later, there was Food Not Bombs and dumpster diving and all sort of energetic punk and folk-punk scenes, but there also rampant cynicism. In the 2000s it didn't feel like anything could or was happening; and if it was, as a young person it certainly didn't feel like it was your place to do anything about it. Yet, if you squinted or or calmed your mind [what my dad called "restfull alertness in the midst of activity"] you might just glimpse a little mirage or glitch that could transport you to another realm, one free of norms and expectations and limits.
My free frame of reference was a teal gameboy color and later an ice-blue game boy advance. It was a series of AA powered CD players and burning countless CDs of pirated music and accidentally getting viruses on the family computer constantly. It was way too many library books, and not learning to drive and having to walk and bike and bus secretly in&&out of town before the public transit shut down to get to concerts and museums and parties or just to walk around somewhere new. It was parents against the odds deciding not to tell you what you could or could not do with your life and an eerie almost cloudless blue sky that always hung around giving off that sense that you could not escape where you were from, yet which practically defied you to make something of yourself beyond whatever you knew or thought you knew. It was an unlikely part-time job at a donut shop where you rose the ranks way too fast and $1.10 bus fares with free transfers if you didn't lose the newsprint ticket. It was a tiny magic shop on the 2nd floor of an old shopping mall getting demolished to build a new intersection and knowing the code to hack the copy machines @ FED-EX/kinko’s so you could reproduce your art &&texts &&ideas to distribute them to friends and acquaintances and paste them up on walls or leave them on metro seats and stapled to telephone poles as a way of insisting no matter the odds:
FREE CITY/FREE STREET (1X)
FREE CITY/FREE STREET (2X)
FREE CITY/FREE STREET (3X)
– V.S.
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