From 2008 to 2009, I worked as a segment producer for BoingBoingTV. Both an incredible learning experience and a non-stop sprint from week to week, I managed to try my hand at producing, music direction, animation creation, script writing, and a bit of improv. Though it ended, as many good things do, I look back on the time with great fondness and appreciation for what I was able to absorb.
During my time there, the small crew of three to five BBers created over 150 episodes. Over that time, BBtv was featured in CNN, the Guardian, Yahoo!, Digg, and won several Webby awards.
Today we revisit one of the most impactful moments in the history of TMR. Episode 86 marked the departure of Mepper Storey. While he was partially resurrected in Episode 95, he merely was able to roam the Mep landscape as a tortilla-eating zombie.
Here is the official sendoff for Storey as recorded by the Mep deity known as the Giant Flying Beaver that Rules the Universe:
I don’t mean to be telling tales out of school, but friend and fellow Mepper, Storily Clayton, once shared with me a theory of time that I found both brilliant and strangely comforting.
The idea is as follows: If we think of time as the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun (which is how we typically measure a year), any given time is actually a very specific geographical position in the Earth’s orbit. In other words, the Earth is in a nearly identical spot today as it was a year ago. And so am I, and so are you, as are all other passengers on the giant blue sphere as it careens through space. We are constantly traveling through “time” at over 66,000 miles per hour around an orbital track over 585 million miles long.
This gives a strangely physical or spatial quality to time. And lends a lot more credence to the relativists’ notion of Space/Time as a single entity.
It also warrants a new type of observation. Are we prone to certain behaviors or actions at certain times of the year because we find ourselves in the same geographical location?
I mean, think about how returning to a formative location (a school you graduated from, a house you spent your childhood, a old familiar dive bar) affects your thoughts and brings back certain old lines of thinking, certain memories.
Now realize that visits to those locations are randomly strewn about space; each visit to the school (that wasn’t an anniversary of another visit) could have taken place hundreds of thousands of miles apart from each other (in the context of where you are in space). Relatively speaking, the only time when you’re anywhere near in the same place as you had been before, is on the yearly anniversary of a given day. Even if you are on the other side of the planet (having a circumference of about 25,000 miles) on that anniversary you’re still much closer to your location on that anniversary than a half hour later, when you’ve moved another 30,000 miles down the orbital track.
So Mr. Clayton often uses his blog as an empirical analysis of how different times tend to affect him. And I’ve begun to buy into this line of thinking. I just re-listened to Mep Report 18, an absolutely phenomenal specimen that we recorded almost exactly three years ago. And I listened to myself wrestle with life questions that have been occurring to me very recently. I suppose I can only truly be in the same mental “space” as I was for TMR 18 during this time of year.
My character was a precocious half-elf champion with the unlikely name of Skystrider Antilles. He, and other Mep House avatars vigilantly defended the lands of Hibernia.
But that is a tale for another time. Today I want to share an old piece of short fiction that stemmed from DAOC lore and my frustrations with ISP provider, SBC Yahoo!
Fortunately Brandeis came to its senses about the Rose Museum kerfuffle a few weeks ago, but alumni just got a message from the president which was intended to “clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding these issues.” I only bring it up here briefly because I get annoyed when other factors–meteors, locusts, a terrible flood–get blamed for something instead of the real culprit, in this case the administration itself.
Russ and the Christmas Curse, Greg Calls Natural Laws Out, What If God Was a Baby, Russ Goes to the Island of Dr. Santa Claus, Russ is No Longer a Fan of Cheese, Russ is Hit Over the Head With a Yuletide Log, 11 Months of Sanity Out of 12 Isn’t So Bad, Clea Calls the West Coast Out (Again), and Gandalf Claus.
…since we’re doing the debate metaphor, I thought I’d finish with my “rebuttal” speech. But since Jehuda ended up “punting” (though not surprisingly and unlike Storey, I applaud him for it), I figure there’s no reason to go through some big point by point refutation. I’ll just make three final statements:
Before Storey and I continue our pleasant little war, it appears Brandeis has already ended the debate, while pretending the sides weren’t the right ones to begin with. From Jehuda Reinharz to the Brandeis community today:
I must admit I hadn’t expected a reply of any kind from a fellow Mepper, though I considered the possibility that some Brandeis alumns might disagree (though, as Storey points out, the vast majority of Brandeis alumni are as annoyed about this as I am)–but I must say I was pretty flabbergasted at Storey’s take on my post about the closing of the Rose Museum.
The more I think about Brandeis’s new scheme, the angrier I get. So I’ve crossposted this entry from my personal website here. Nothing particularly funny about this situation, but I felt this needed to be said:
