pull it out of the air

ever since i took that fateful webdesign class and the internet veritably chewed up my life, i've thought a small but persistent little thought, and it wants there to be more handwritten things in life.

the only trouble with handwritten things is they don't scale unless you do something funky and technical with them. i can't show anyone but the girl sitting next to me in church my little sacrament meeting doodles unless i get a scanner, image editing software, or at the very least a copy machine and a lot of envelopes. it's all gotta be so complicated.

that said, i'm glad i've had the experience i've had working with print media. as cool as the web stuff is, print stuff rocks. this is because you have more power. you control what happens to a thing when you print it. you hold it in your hands when it is born onto paper, you put it all together and glaze it with finishing touches before it gets shipped out to your audience. all the variables are in your court.

okay, not quite all the variables. printers are technology just as much as your computer monitor is. you have to deal with paper sizes and weights. there are constraints there too.

life is one big constraint. even with your little ballpoint pen and a ream of blank white 20# text, you've got restraints. you've got the gravity that won't let you write upside-down. you've got the edge of that 20# text. you've got the shape of your hand, the shape of the pen, the elbow of that girl sitting next to you in the way.

life comes in so many media flavors these days. a lot of it we hardly notice. i switch from using a stapler to flipping through a magazine to answering the telephone to clicking through the boring songs on pandora without really thinking about the profound interactive differences there are in each of those actions. there are so many ways to make things happen. i can throw the stapler at the wall. i can write an email to the powers that be and therein describe the finer points of my resignation. i can draw lines on paper. i can carve div tags into cyberspace.

so these people are blending print and web 2.0 technologies in cool ways: moo and 8020 publishing. i like it (yeah, despite my semi-anti-flickr attitude.)

it makes me wonder, what's next?

i'm very glad my curiosity will never die.