About my last entry

This TED talk connects a whole lot to my last entry about kids and learning. It's not realy on the same specific subjec but the mindset is alike.

Not eaven close

Today has been a very unproductive day. I've spent several hours just looking at my screen, expecting the portfolio to magically appear out of thin air, and to my discontent it didn't. I cleaned up the two cells that I have used to work in during the semester just to have something to do.
At lunch, however I saw a debate show rerun on svt and it was actually on a quite interesting subject: Swedish school kids are using their cellphones to videotape their teachers behaving badly or themselves messing with their teachers. Of course the footage travels directly to youtube for all to watch, I guess the flicks are spread trough Playahead, the Swedish early-teen community above all others these days. The debate was flawed, as usual since nether teacher, pupils nor politicians involved took the much needed step back and tried to see a larger picture. They mainly discussed if cellphones should be banned during class or not and if there should be a law about it. The problem is of course not that the clips are made and that they get distributed online, that is just a symptom. Uploading your footage is an act of discontent, just like we tagged restrooms and walls with graffiti, and set fire to the occasional billboard during our school time. Therefore a law about it will do nothing, in very much the same way as an aspirin won’t heal a broken leg. And touching the topic I wrote about yesterday the kids already live outside the law, why should they respect a new one that clearly just works against them and does nothing but limit their personnel freedom.
And for the teachers who feel that their privacy is violated: think about that before voting for more surveillance friendly parties next election!
Now I'm going to attempt to point out the real problem, it’s likely that even I won’t be able to take enough steps back.
The kids today is a bunch of spoiled brats. They act up on elders, don’t respect morale or authority and their culture is turning further and further away from the community. They rather spend time in Azaroth then with their family, who is working late anyway. When the urge to leave home and explore during evenings and weekends arise there is nothing to do for them except some shopping. All of them can always communicate with each other in a way neither parents or teachers can identify with, making their friends not only more important then family but also their tribe. Their main loyalty will always be to the tribe, and none of us can get into it. The tribe is disgraced, feared and ignored by the adult society and the Tribe has decided that they make their own rules, since the existing rules only apply to a world that don't give a shit.
A few summers ago I worked on a after school facility (Fritids in Swedish), I and about half of the other employees could get across to the kids and actually communicate with them, teach them something about the world in the best days, just checking to see how they felt on most days. One day I found the only older employee who had a real connection with the kids sitting down with a few of the kids who had what we sometimes call behavior or attitude problems. Officially he was teaching them to read since their teacher in school had failed at this, but there was not much reading going on, they were sitting down and talking like equals. I asked him what thy where doing "I'm doing what their parents should have done, I'm raising them." he replied.
And that is what we all should do, that or get ready for the revolution. Everyone older than 19 will be shot. Persons who represent power and ignorance will be molested, and then shot. And we all deserve it.

Portfolio, they say

So, I’m spending the last few days of this semester (and most of the Christmas vacation, I suspect) working on a portfolio. It’s a bit more challenging then I thought it would be at first, a lot of the other people in class also seem to think this. Perhaps it’s a bit too early for this module. I don’t feel that I want to brag about stuff that i did in the first few modules and I can’t pun anything from the class site in yet since were still making it.

So right now it’s hard. However I didn’t sigh up for an easy education and I’m quite sure it will work out in the end but right now my bath is quite dark and unclear.

In other news i watched a speech that Isak posted on My daily Bread. It deals with copyright, user generated content and states the fact that a lot of us are living outside the law right now and have come to consider this normal. As a self claimed expert on pop culture and a very unofficial spokesperson of the youth today may comment is (and yes, you may quote me but only if you use the whole quote, or of course remix it with something else to a new content): "We live this way because it’s the only way we know of. Not remixing and redistributing as we see fit makes us feel like prisoners or the un-free population under a dictatorship. We do not consider ourselves as criminals, we consider ourselves as free. We claim that the law is not only outdated, it’s downright wrong. Taking what is and redesigning it to fit our purposes says more to our audience then original, brand new content would. Take for instance segments where G.W.B. and Blair lip-synchs to various songs (the gaybar version is my favorite). They are political comments containing a message that is easy to understand and take part of and expressing the same themes in another way would be al lot harder to get across in traditional writing not to mention the much smaller target audience, none of us consider this a violation of Electric Six song nor the footage used. Outlawing it is like outlawing literacy."
Reality is what we make it be, why not rewrite the broken parts.

All I can do is read a book to stay awake..

I apology for the lack of updates lately, there is however a good reason for it. Since my arrival at Hyper Island I've spent a whole lot of time in front of my laptop. I worked on it all day, went home with it and spend the night watching different TV series, playing games and sis some heavy facebooking. After a trip to Stockholm a few weekend ago I realized how free I felt without my computer with me at all times. Then i started to leave it in school, staying for maybe an hour or so later the days i felt like watching some show or playing some game and it made me feel so much more like a real person again. However the blog has been suffering since I regularly update in the middle of the nights when the insomnia just keeps me going and going and going like a dammed Duracell bunny...

We are acting like a design agency for another group right now and I'm doing a lot of odd jobs, I started as Copywriter (and I still am) but have ventured into the strange land of Interaction design and I helped the graphical people with a few lesser tasks during the last week. It's quite good but I’m getting a bit fed up with the project. I just want it to be over with and start with the next module.
We have had really great time management and is all but done with two days to deadline. So it’s easy street all the way to Christmas Eve.

A few days ago I got my copy of Guitar Hero II and I’ we spent some nights rocking away with it, since I know a guy who makes custom electric guitars came with the brilliant plan to turn a real guitar into a controller instead of the small plastic one that comes with the game. We'll see how it works out in the end.

About the new season of Nip/Tuck: What the hell is going on? Have some of the staff writes from Days of our lives taken over the show? The supremely cool and smart shock-soap(tm) has turned completely bonkers. Sociopathic übersmart blackmailing schoolgirls, sexual exploits for the sole purpose of getting a pair of tits mote into this week’s episode, turning one of the main characters into a male prostitute, characters changing the way they work (witch into he beginning was Nip/tuck's biggest strength) as often as regular people shower... The list goes ever on.
Get it together!

Just a link

Fromers internet tip: Bret Easton Ellis talks about writing Lunar Park, Crisitan Bale and dosn't comment on the similarities of Glamourama and Zoolander. All this on BBC.

The downfall of western civilization

I just watched Fredrik Hären's lecture on developing and developed countries. It was an eye opener. He put his fingers on several things I have sensed the last few years or so but couldn’t turn into words. Watch it yourself if you haven’t yet on youtube. It's only in Swedish but you’ll have to live with that.

We presented typography works for William Hall the other day and mine was a real late night rush job. I still like my basic idea but following trough with it was nothing I was good at around 4:am. Right now I'm considering remaking it, not changing the idea, only the result.

One step back, to see clearer.

The first music video I saw on MTV was Pula Abdul - Opposites Attract. I didn’t leave the house today, its 3 am and I still haven’t done the work I meant to be done with about five hours ago. Instead I spent my weekend in Azeroth. Going back and revisit the place, nostalgically walking trough zones and quest-lines and thinking of the people I met there, the journeys we made and mobs we downed, I also fully recall when I stopped playing that game and why.
Currently living in a city with about four places to go out to, all being in a sliding scale between bad and horrible makes me want to stay home a lot more then I used to. I haven’t really left the house since I came back from Hyper on Friday night.
I didn't only look back to a few yearlong online gaming trip and the visits to Broncos that came with it, I tried to look back on the entire time since I left the university and made the promise to myself to never more study for the sake of studies. Having the bad odd-jobs and various forms of internships and welfare-activities made creativity something special. Being a Hyper Island student and after that venture out in the digital media industry I'll always have to be creative. Every single day. I haven't crated anything for myself since I got here, save this blog and the half-assed Photoshop images that I sometimes post in it.
This is beginning to sound like one of those winey late at night posts that brings regret to me the day after i write them but my conclusion will probably make up for it.

Hold your breath...

Here we go:
All the nostalgia aside, I think looking back is a great way to see not only where you are now but also to se why you are there. I went to Hyper because I really and genuinely wanted to. I like the education, so far and feel that my talents have developed quite a bit since I got there. Not the talents that I thought would grow; I must admit but so far I’m feeling confident that it was the best possible move i have made in quite some time.
Also revisiting WoW is in many ways like spending the day with an old friend you don’t longer hang out with or maybe like letting your ex-girlfriend and her buds stay in your house when they end up in your town and need a place to crash. It’s nice, but that’s because you’re on familiar ground and you know it won't be as last time, when you drifted apart or broke up or the game just wasn't fun anymore because its already happened.
Evolving is doing things you’re not sure of and going where you haven't been before. And that’s the biggest lesson yet for me from hyper.
Maybe I won’t feel like writing a novel or a 12-issue comic book about a hitman again for a few years, instead I intend to be well paid.

Sleep tight, I know I will.

All good things are three

Firstly my group presented our business idea to the bank yesterday and we ALMOST got a yes from them. Our project was a independent music/games/movie store and they thought we should get one of the artists who are cutting themselves free from the major labels (like Radiohead just did) with us before we could have our three million sek, it was in my opinion the best possible outcome. I'm proud like the father of a newborn child. Also the modules now over and that’s also nice.

Secondly Farfar has done another really cool website, its at http://emotionalcities.com/ check it out now! Probably everyone in Stockholm already know about it but it’s great to see that someone has not axed their cleverness division yet (yes I’ we been watching too much zeropunctuation lately).

Thirdly Nip/tuck is back again and better, so is Julia. Joely Richardson who plays Julia moved back to England to take care of her sick daughter in the middle of last season and was written out of the series, but with possibility to return and now she has. If you’re not really sure what I’m talking about get the god dam DVD boxes today! Nip/tuck is probably the most qualitative show yet, While it’s not my favorite show of all time it still has best acting, script and is just provocative enough. They have changed the look of the operations from last season, usually it’s a mix of grace and gore but this time around the grace parts are not to be found for some reason.

Greetings from häktet

Our CEO said something random about the simmilariies of Häktet (our main facility here in Karlskrona, an old prisson bulding) and Alcatraz...

CMYK, motherfucker, do you use it ?

http://www.reclaimmagenta.net

Jochmetropolitan will be in CMYK untill T-mobile gives back magenta to the people!

Light Our Path

I thought about an old guidebook that I studied on some or other scoutmaster course several years ago, I think the Swedish title was "Lys vår led" (which roughly translates to light our path), and how one sided it was. Being the project manager for this module I've had to look back and reinvent my leadership style. Old stuff like lys vår led drifts ashore from the large ocean of passive knowledge. back then I thought it was quite a crappy book, it presented theories on how to make the kids listen to you, how to make the program well balanced and of course the basic "do this in case of emergency" instructions. Everything hard about being a scout master I had to learn myself, courses and seminars served as a good way to hear how other people did it and maybe give them something to try as well, but it was mainly easy stuff like where there was a good cabin to rent for a weekend in the forest with the kids or how they planned their trip to Iceland or some other whateverness. How to make an imprint and hopefully add something to the kids was something I had to learn by trying, trying and then trying some different stuff. In the end the control and comfort I and the kids felt with each other was in proportion to their age. I work best with the oldest age group that are somewhere between ninth grade and second/third year into the Swedish gymansiet (16-19 year olds). My leadership is sort of sneaky and from the backline at this point. I try to find out what they want to do quite early in the year, let them rediscover it a few months later, sometimes i decide but make them think its their own choice and so on, I provide the solid wall they can lean upon and the one to ask about stuff they don’t know, but mainly I try to make them reach their own goals and to make them feel as strong and independent as possible while reaching it.
However during my time on Hyperisland I found this entire method unfitting. Mainly because hyper island is not a place you show up to once a week to do something you and your friends have decided to do. It’s a simplified work simulator.
I needed time and practice from IS and exp-tech before daring to try the Project Manager role. Time to dethatch from what I used to do and how I used to do it. These two first weeks in the rearview mirror, I’m not really sure I've succeeded. Yet. It's really hard to say, the strangest thing about our group is that whatever we decides I have to repeat once before it actually counts. I've been saying "So, it’s the meaning of the group to.." and "Yes, We all want to [insert diction here] right? then let’s do it." more times than I thought was possible.

Let’s see how it plays out..

Everything I know about Cool I learned from watching The Warriors!

The Warriors might be the coolest little flick ever made. At least it’s by far the coolest film I've seen to this date. Why, do you ask, is this a blogworthy topic?
Several reasons. Firstly, there are three of the credits that are LARGER than the rest, the regular writer and director but in this case also the ART director. And what art direction it is. From Gramancy Riffs, Baseball Furies to Warriors and of course the boring outfit known as Orphans style and personality is the key to gang colors. If gangs in real life looked like that I’d sing up as foot soldier for my local gang of boppers and heavy mother-dudes today. Looks, style, music, camera movement is so... cool. There is no other word for it. Look at the trailer!

Also, the villain is the same guy who plays Jerry Horne (Ben's brother)in Twin Peaks!

Fifty ways to kill yourself and seven days to die

So; we have been popping ideas like euro-disco-kids in the in nineties popped pills for the last few days. Today we hit our goal, fifty or slightly over. This gives us pretty much an whole day off tomorrow, there is some group evaluation thingies going on but it will take like one hour or something, the only disturbing thing is that we don't know when it’s going down. We wrote a sort of von-oben letter to the coworker responsible for telling us what time we should be in school.

I have also made the maybe not so wise decision to watch Snakes on a Plane. A film with its title spawning from actually trying to come up with the worst title for a script at that moment called Venom. I will tell you more about what I thought about it in a while.

I’ve started to feel even more isolated in Karlskrona. Meting Palle for coffee the other day sort of reminded me of the spare time away from the laptop that I used to have. Something g has to be done before I get the blues and start to shut down mentally.

Post experience-tech

So our wonderful marble track did only work for a few hours before it went bonkers again... it meant that we spent most of the day explaining to people how it was supposed to work and was unable to show them, which was kind of a drag. But tomorrow there is a new module and a new battle to win. Concept and Development, I'm looking forward to it. It sounds closer to what I really want to do then anything we have done before. I like concepting and could really have use of some development-skills.

On my trip to Stockholm the other week i found a whole lot of new and nice T-shirts... that i didn’t buy for some strange reason. The si-fi bokhandeln has a quite nice line of cthulhiana, my favorites read "Insmouth high school swimming team" and "Miscantonic University Astronomical Society: the stars are bright". It makes me want to take up screen-printing T-shirts again.

On a happy note: My friend Palle texted me today and said that he was in town, I was somewhat shocked that someone would just be in Karlskrona for no obvious reason but then I remembered that his grandparents live in Ronneby.

Paint the exebition red!

My Vaio have returend from its trip to France.

I thought we would get the whole thing were building for EX-TECH done by today but a million of things got between me and actual work being done. Things like lectures and presentations. In the end we actually had time to put the large pieces of wood together and the so to say frame for Marble Inferno was real. And red. Really red. And now there is lots and lots of stuff left to do before Thursday when I will make my fist trip back to Stockholm since I left.
Today I also found out that the Stockholm hyper kids have planned some sort of presentation that will be rolling for the main part of the evening where people are meant to stand and represent their class. We are meant to bring a 15" macbook pro to make it look "professional" it will display what we have done so far in the classes.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
I don’t even know where to start on this one... It’s just too much.. Firstly I’m there to get drunk for as little cash as possible with the Stockholm ad-biz. Secondly how does a 15" macbook pro look more professional than a 17" or a regular macbook or any other laptop for that matter? Thirdly how does my future career get a boost from showing 15 second long motions by people who can't actually use after effects properly but have done so anyway? Fourthly why didn’t we get our hands on this info ages ago, like the 26: th when it apparently went out to the co-workers?

On a happy note: The new season of Weeds is so much better than the two earlier ones. The plotlines and the dialogues are sharp. Have they changed the main writer of the show or did Showtime finally cut the old one loose to do what she actually wanted to do from day one? Keep it up Jenji Kohan!

High: Expec-Tech-tions

After the terrible discovery that there was an unexpected extra day of the weekend I started to crawl up the walls of Duckburg. Quite literally, just ask anyone in the collective. Tuesday was a bliss, finally something to do! Te lecture was good and the first assignment was fun. I’m relay positive about my group that will work trough this uncharted wasteland of opportunity and dreams during the weeks to come.
The Lecturer we had today, Björn Renner, cold best be described in the original meaning of the Swedish word "flunmmig". This will require some background, especially for the international readers. Flummig is a word that now-a-days basically is a combination of weird and wasted but in the 70's it meant something quite different; shocking and trying to shake your believes foundation but in a safe and secure way. There is to my knowledge no word in ether Swedish or English with that meaning so I, from time to time, actually say "Flummig, in the words original meaning." in conversation where I see it fit.

Tomorrow my dear Sony Vaio will go on a holiday to France, because PC's suck and Mac's rule. It will return in 5-10 workdays. See you all then.

T shirt mock-up

This image might benefit from some explanation, even if I feel that art should speak for itself. Firstly there is a pun that’s quite hard to get unless you know that Adobe is pronounced with a silent e in Sweden. Secondly it’s a comment on piracy, the ridicules cost to purchase CS3 and the state of the digital nation, the obvious use of a Photoshop filter is meant to emphasize this. As allways, click the image to view it in full size.

Hear me now and beleve me later!

Sitting in the dining hall in Duckburg, diners just over and everyone has turned focus to their laptops once again. The coffee is still fresh. Kasper has just run out of strange music.
I’m tired.
Dead tired, to be honest.

We had our presentations earlier today, and to be quite frank our class really needs to work on the presentation skills. A few groups made sort of nice motions but the constant talking, agency after agency dissected, how many employees, what their specialty was going on forever and ever and ever. Can't say that my group was any different, if anything we had more computer trouble then the rest and kept to formula for the rest of the presentation.

I bought a portable hard drive today, rely useful since I'll have to send my partly broken lappy for reparations in the next few days. Just hope that Sony sends me a backup computer.

These blogs of ours (or in Isak's case weblog) just keep growing in numbers, what are we really meant to use them for? Most of them just contain a "hello world" kind of message and maybe the 15 sec motion we did for this Monday. My two former blogs where complete failures in the end. no one really read them, hand i didn't care to update them often.

Here are the links to the old and dead blogs: Oraklet talar and Ickebloggen. Ickebloggen was written under the clever pseudonym Johan.

Another day, another deadline

Today we had another deadline, the written stuff for information Society. People had a lot of different ideas about how to interpret the email with instructions. I must say it was quite unclear (like the majority of the information we get from Hyper) what we were expected to hand in. However we had time for last minute text layout and some other nice stuff.

Yesterday was the 11:th of September and like every year since the twin towers I recalled what I did that year, how Tom Clancy was the first one to actually comment on the events. I don't recall the interview word by word, but basically he said that he himself could organize a terrorist attack of that scale in with only a few days planning.

For comments on America’s political behavior post-9/11 I will refer to the excellent series Studio 60 on the Sunset strip.

Roy Andersson was in the latest issue of Nöjesguiden, he had loads of sharp things to say about the terrible state of the Swedish film industry, my favorite part was about the movie script and its place in Swedish drama " It's so dam idiotic, because a screenplay guarantees next to nothing. There has been an overwhelming trust in the screenplay. The whole damn Swedish film industry has attended those screenplay classes and that’s why all these fucking movies look just the same. They all read the book "How to write a selling screenplay". Even Dramatiska Institutet who is meant to be the most important film school in Sweden bought it."

On a happy note I got CSN, and won’t have to work extra at Sifo during the evenings.
TTFN

E-motion

Hello bloggreaders!
This is the first entry in my new blog, Jocke goes Hyper. Itt will escribe my experience of being a yper Island studen, my thoughts about the assignments we are given, problems, solutions and so on. I will try to keep this blog proffesional, but since my life in Karlskrona only circles around Hyper Island the border is quite thin and sometimes hard so see.

A few days ago I finished my first personal asignment, a 15 sec long animation. My intentions wasa to make it feel like the animations in Montey Pythons Flying Circus, Terry Gilliam eaven makes a cammeo. I worked mainly with photoshop during the assignment, building and creating art took way longer then the actual animation, i also keept to basic transforms, pre comps and masking and didn't start to mess around with different animation f/x or filters. Partly because i didn't want to run out of time with a compleatre mess to how and party because i culnd't make them feel werry Gilliamish. If I have sucessfully learnt to use YouTube the film will be watchble below.