This morning for some reason I remembered that I have a built in camera on my computer. Many macs do. But I couldn’t remember how to take a snapshot, so I had to do a little digging. Apparently it may not even be possible to take a still photo, because my search only yielded two items which were both video-type things. One is iChat which lets you do video chatting (!) and the other is iMovie, which I assumed was just a recording platform but evidently you can also splice stuff together and whatnot. I think one of my DVDs opened up in iMovie on accident once so I might be able to cut between me and clips from Monty Python or something, which might have REALLY REALLY COOL implications, my broadcasting methods over the Beautiful Briny Web may have just become more vast. But probably not, since ultimately I think I prefer the ol’ words and pictures. I’m not really seeing this as a talking head newscast of my life, but more like a public notepad from me to you. More conceptual things, less me floundering around with nothing to say.

Some notes on the video:

1. We went out last night to celebrate my LAST DAY OF REAL CLASS, so I’m a little hungover in the video. I’ve never actually been hungover before so that’s interesting, sociologically, to me.

2. I mention in the video that I was not going to put it on youtube — and I’m not trying to be cute I just assumed that no one in legoland the USS Internets would really care about my little hungover self talking about what day it is and what happens to be sitting around my computer. But then I remember that if I wanted to use it for anything online youtube is at present the easiest way to do that. Duh. If I were using this for any real purpose I would probably cut it, because I think my program will.

3. Apparently I use the word ‘fabulous’ a lot. It’s a good word I suppose, but I didn’t realize it’s one of my stock placeholders when I can’t think of anything to say. Maybe work on that.

4. They’re sort of addictive to do. Once I did one I did another, and another, but those were shortly deleted on grounds of being uninteresting. I can see why Natalie and Drew started doing this. I think it’s also a sign of our times. A few years ago people were really shy about putting pictures of themselves on the web or mentioning what part of the country they were posting from, because of web predators. Now we have myspace and facebook, everyone blogs, and everyone does everything publicly on the web. It’s a weird world, no?

It takes a really long time to load a nine minute video up on YouTube. In this day and age when 7 pictures in flickr takes a mere swig of coffee’s time, this was really shocking to me. Videos must take up a lot of space and I will probably delete it from my hard drive which is another reason I’m okay with it being online.

Anyway. The video can be found here if you’re interested. I don’t like embedding videos because I think it looks bad on blogs, but you can open it in a new tab/window and come back. I’ll still be here.

And speaking of video-chat: dude! Does any want to video chat with me? I don’t want slutty things obviously I want to do it For Science, because I’ve never imagined such a thing would be possible in my lifetime. We’ve envisioned tele-conference ever since the 1950’s science fiction shows, and it’s something we imagine sleezy CEOs doing with their sweatshot factory owners. But here we are in 2008 and video chat is available to someone like me on accident. Video chat, people! I FUCKING LOVE BEING ALIVE!

There is a very strange thing that goes on with the built in camera in iMovie versus iChat. I opened iChat first, and played with my moving image there for a little bit. In iChat your image is a mirror-image, meaning if you were to reach out and poke yourself your finger would meet you there. However in iMovie the camera is, well, a camera. So the image you are looking at is what the camera is seeing, so if you were to reach out to poke yourself, your video-image would not meet you there. It confused the hell out of me the first time I opened the program, because while it makes sense when you think about it, okay this is a camera, so it’s across from me, looking at me most people don’t have a live (well, live-ish) feed of what that looks like. Most people being filmed are not watching themselves being filmed. So it’s weird to do.

iChat, while being AMAZING, is a strange exercise now that I think about it. The only time we see people we are talking to is when we are talking to people in real life. Every other time we are talking to someone over some sort of media — telephone, letter, email, instant message, etc. — we do not see their face. So we will have to work that out in our little brains. Displaced, yet not displaced because we see them, yet REALLY displaced because it is a video image. There’s the other issue of being able to see YOURSELF simultaneously, which is nothing like anything on earth unless you are speaking to someone in a mirror. I don’t know where the eyeline will be; I’m not sure if you look in the lens or if the computer is smart enough to give you the ability to look at your chat-partner in the eyes. Eye contact is a rather important element in conversation, and I’m not thinking you’d get that properly in iChat.