Even though my surname is not Voorhees, each time a Friday the 13th rolls along, it always brings me mixed feelings, and it’s not just me. Fellow Jasons often share the same sentiment. So, I thought that I’d hand out a nice goodie, another video done by our ASL genius, Jon Thompson. It’s called RUMBLES IN THE BAR! If you haven’t seen this, this is groundbreaking!
Here’s another awesome ASL video that I think people should check out. Jon Thompson, a friend of mine since middle school, calls this video An Idiot Boy And A Motorbike. He has a lot of potential and we should look forward to his future productions!
This is an example of ASL so pure it defeats any possible translation into English. This is an example of such advanced ASL that it would be impossible for hearing people to continue the claim that ASL is just a “lower” form of English.
This is but one example of something that I think more people should start doing. Then, we would have plenty of quality material to create our own TV channel. Or, if you take in all together all the people who has done vlogs, video productions, etc, we all would have enough amassed experience to pursue a truly bigger project, such as a Hollywood-type movie. If we could raise enough money, maybe a few million dollars, we could truly create something so out of this world that’d amaze hearing people all over the world and change their perceptions towards us once for all. I know this is a fantasy, but dreams do come true.
Instead of having people watch myself talk for 30 minutes while I vent my mind, here’s what I mean by the future of vlogs: what it should look like: a form of entertainment you see on TV. Chantal Deguire, a Canadian Deaf filmmaker, just released Science Fiction Live Action Video Premiere, a trailer for a video that’ll be released on April 27th. It looks promising!
Flying planes (both the real thing and R/C), skydiving, kite-surfing, reading, astronomy, mycology, traveling, exchanging trivia tidbits, trekking (summited Africa’s 19,344-ft Mt. Kilimanjaro in July 2001), hockey goaltending, working with computers, interacting with people, problem solving, working with my hands, building and launching rockets, doing eccentric scientific experiments, woodworking, enjoying movies, collecting antique books, SCUBA diving, breeding and raising purebred Bengal cats. The list can go on and on, but time is a limitation.
It seems like I operate like NASA at times. When such a complex system unravels, chaos reigns. There’s much delay in getting back to flight status. After the Apollo I fire in 1967 -where the three crewmembers died on the top of the rocket in a fire during a dress rehearsal- and after the losses of space shuttles Challenger and Columbia -and their 14 crewmembers- it took them a couple years to get back on track every time, better than ever every time.
I had to undergo and recover from a series of collapses and crashes -figuratively speaking- after the fiascocial pre-Davila Gallaudet Administration actively prevented me from continuing my graduate studies as a President’s Fellow, but it was actually a blessing in disguise. I’ll tell you why later. The track I was travelling on became so warped and grossly misaligned, it could no longer function as effective conveyors of life, abruptly throwing me off course. The vehicle I was travelling in was in many places corrupted down to the core. I could continue with the analogies. Basically speaking, I’m baaaa-ck and can’t wait to get started! It’s time for me to once again stand on the e-soapbox (after a few false starts).
It took six unmanned Apollo test flights before we Americans finally returned to space. But, failure was not an option and we reached the Moon before the Russians did! It took a little while longer, with some extra steps added in between. but, the goal was achieved. So was it with the Space Shuttle. It keeps on flying even after two shocking losses of spaceship and its crew and two major delays in the program. But, we are back up there, continuing to build the International Space Station, while the best the Russians can do is only bring up tourists there (but that’s better than any other country can do at this time, till China sends their taikonauts to the Moon by 2012).
I could draw a whole another set of analogies on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the personality of its space program, how the fact that you’re really focused on the competition, on showing that you’re better than the other, contributes to the general, utter deterioriation of everything inside, which causes a total collapse. Yet, Mother Russia survives. But this is a study of the collapse, not the revival and continuation of something really good, strong and reliable. If you wanted a study of a birth of something, study the Chinese space program! Simply said, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time you try to do something new, something that both the USA and Soviet Union were guilty of before. The Chinese are gonna beat us back to the moon- they say they’ll go there by 2012, while Bush (if you believe him) says that we’ll go back there by 2020 (Between us, I think a private company will beat NASA to the moon, maybe by 2015 or so, which will kick-start them into sending humankind to Mars before anybody else). And know what pisses me off? That it will cost only $200 billion to do it (go back to the Moon), and we gotta watch the Chinese wave back at us from the Moon while we pay off the Iraqi war debt, a $417 billion burden on our future, ballooning continually with no end in sight. Guess who’s one of the biggest lenders of that money? Our best friend: The People’s Republic of China.
I kinda stepped off the soapbox not long after I did my first 2 vlogs because I needed to to focus on myself first. It would be impossible to develop concrete goals, figure out what to do next in order to reach them if I was spending most of my remaining energy to write blogs and produce vlogs. Heck, some people get paid a lot of money to produce the type of stuff that we bloggers/vloggers make, and we do it all for free! A really good blog that you spend time reading everyday is a part of your life, and should be at least about as much as you pay for your newspaper, maybe 25 cents a day. I guess the currency of the blogosphere and its satellite moon, the vlogosphere, is measured in terms of fame and celebrity.
Heck, Ricky “Ridor” Taylor is probably the most famous deaf blogger in the world! But he constantly begs for donations. It is pitiful, really. But he still is better than most reporters in the ability to sniff out information, follow up on leads and maintain a network of contacts. Yet if he doesn’t produce anything for a day or two, people start screaming, pressuring him to produce, despite the fact he’s confined to the sickbed with an acute case of bronchitis. If he was working at the Daily Planet, he would get sick days off! But not for you people! And it’s all volunteerism! Talk about being impressed. Pretty soon, there’ll be an uniform blogger code-of-ethics, which I think Ricky will take pains to make sure he adheres to. I’m not surprised that someday, people will start to have to pay for some premium blog content. Otherwise, they will be left with a lot of uninteresting and unreliable sources of information to be grasped at when, without incentive to keep on going, bloggers lose interest and you lose something good you have always looked forward to just like the daily paper. It’s like Russian Roulette if you want to follow a blogger as if he was Walter Cronkite ever since he covered Vietnam and the moon landing. I have to say, the moon landing was probably the most biggest, bestest, most impossible achievement in mankind, and nowadays we think it’s almost routine. But, we made it there 40 years ago, can’t do it this year, and would have been a mythological lore if it wasn’t real historical fact.
When you have passion in you, it does not require a lot effort to get you started talking. If your job was your passion, you would gladly do it for free for the rest of your life, if you had a means of living. If you really enjoy being a celebrity, or enjoy attention in general, it’s easy to blog on a daily basis and continue to do so, and bask from the attention of millions of adoring fans. If that isn’t the case, then it becomes very difficult, a chore after a while, trying to cater to people who expect to read your blog on their morning routine like the daily paper. We people now find ourselves being read like newspapers!
Life doesn’t come with a map. It has its ups and downs, but when there’s a string of “downs,” there’s a need to focus on myself, not on my public e-persona de la website. If I met with Dr. Phil for a psychotherapy bout, he would tell me that I was ignoring my own personal well-being at the expense of making readers happy with dispatches of increasingly aimless writings. He would go on to say that I would need to take care of first things first, get myself solidly back on track before I resume doing this. In other words, I’ll do a much better job if I am in good physical, mental and emotional shape, beholden to no one but myself.
I don’t particularly feel totally comfortable basking in the limelight because there’s always the chance of instantly becoming a semi-celebrity if you do a good blog/vlog. That wraps a leash around your neck, whether if you like it or not. I never wanted that- be a slave to my own blog. I just wanted to raise awareness about certain issues, such as deaf-related technology.
I never intended to “be the first vlogger.” But it so happened that I was the first person to do a real “vlog,” using that very word, vlog. I said it that way because though there have been others before me who put videos of themselves online, but I was the first Deaf blogger to call it a vlog, a vlog which nearly everybody has seen (at least, that’s how it felt to me), which led other vloggers to start practicing their art publicily. I am pretty sure that the other vloggers thought of it before they saw their first vlog (classic case of I thought of that also! syndrome), but I was really glad to see others follow suit. In fact, it lessened the burden off my back because for a while, I was the only one who made a vlog, and everybody wanted to see more, just like a TV show. With more vloggers, the pressure isn’t there anymore, but some people still do wonder when I will make the next one. I will, trust me. The window of opportunity has just arrived for us to finally have our own TV channel, the technology is finally here, the biggest hurdle is creating consistency, people will expect to see something new every week. Incentives, money, is probably the best solution to making this happen. Where will the money come from? I guess from rich deafies. or deaf-related businesses, like CSD, Sorenson, Hawk Relay, HOVRS and so on, to fund projects. We’ll probably end up with vlogs with commercials! A small price to pay if you want to keep on watching your favorite vlogs, won’t it be? I envision that vlogs won’t just be rants and raves by someone trying to impose his/her view on the world- it will be essentially home-created TV programs that we will all watch. I would love to do a mad-science show, but it is just too hard to do it all by myself. In time, it will be all figured out. Maybe one 5-minute program every week would be realistic.
Seeing Joey Baer set up his own vlog and his instant rise to prominence really made me proud (because he used to be my dorm counselor, ha!). He also impressed me because he encountered the same problem I did: money. But he continued doing it. It made me feel like it was worth it paying a few hundred dollars for the software and video streaming fees, because the message got out. Now, technology like YouTube and cheap video editing software makes it more accessible than ever. Of course, if I never created a vlog, someone else would have done it and be considered the “first”. I just hope that it would have happened in time for the community to really use the new kind of power in order to save Gallaudet from the haunting grips of AGB’s cursed legacy. But that didn’t happen in the parallel universe that we all ended up in.
I paid a LOT of money for software and video streaming fees in order to spread awareness. It’s easier than you think to become your own TV channel with millions potential viewers. I knew that vlogging would be powerful, but not as POWERFUL as it is now, and I wonder what it will be like next year! I never expected the 9th President of Gallaudet to be an avid vlogger himself. I never expected that vlogs would play an integral role in orchestrating the coup d’universite that finally lifted the dark sheath enveloping Kendall Green, bringing long-awaited light towards our parched, thirsty eyes. Finally, dawn has arrived.
This cultural phenomenon “vlogging” as a word, has became a total phenomenon. The tables are turned. We, as a group of inviduals are in control of our destinies.
I do wonder if JKF had started her own vlog, like Bob Davila did, while she was the “9th President-Desginate” displaying her oft-hidden charm and sense of humor. It would probably have helped her cause a lot, and probably ultimately saved her appointment, because it would have shown her as being-in-touch. But, everything she did seemed orchestrated, staged by her consultants. What Bob Davila is doing, comes across as geninue. That was what JKF was missing all along. All we wanted was a human being, not someone who is oft-suspected of having a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome. That’s actually what many people think! (check the Wikipedia link out, scroll down to “Classification and Diagnosis” and see for yourself if you don’t think whether if this finally explains why JKF acts the way she does?)
A lot people say that JKF has better ASL skills than Bob Davila. Technically, maybe. But, I’m glad that happened because that once for all totally exterminates the argument that JKF was “not deaf enough.” JKF would probably get a better ASL SCPI score, but Bob would whip her on the debate floor and public speaking floor, let alone consensus-building and making an university function as the de facto Deaf Mecca. Bob has an interesting way of signing some things sometimes, but so does my mom, who I dearly love! Heck, in the eyes of those signing-impaired people, we seem like monkeys flailing our arms. Simply said. I have high hopes and expectations for Gallaudet, because it’s ours yet again! Say never again to 1880 Milan. Never again.
Advantage comes to these who are more attuned to prevailing trends, identifying and using them to their advantage, just like you would catch a wave on a surfboard. That’s why we are able to control our destiny. And it is destiny that we bring eternal disappointment to Alexander Graham Bell, ensuring that he continues to roll in his coffin till the day global cooling reaches the depths of Hell, causing it to freeze over.