If you’ve no idea who the Vlogbrothers are, here’s a quick history.  Starting in 2007, Hank and John Green agreed to forgo textual communication for youtube videos.  They’ve since been posting videos (as of today they are at 960 videos), have created a community (known as Nerdfighters), and have spun off many new interesting initiatives all over the internet.

You can find their Youtube channel here.  Or take a moment and watch one of their latest videos where Hank reviews the location for this year’s VidCon (one of those many initiatives the brothers are responsible for).

Watching their videos has given me an idea of my own, which I hope to put into practice fairly soon.  I can only hope to be as entertaining as they have been over the years.

The exercise, which I qualify as a success on many levels, resulted in the most post-active month on the site ever (January 2009 was the previous record holder with 15 posts).  The site activity also saw other great changes:

We got more people to visit, woo!

• A new Google Plus page (which you should definitively follow )
• The resumption of Equanimity posts
• A new netZoom format
• Some new site logos
• Some new site pages for the Regular Series
• A doubling in the number of visitors to the site

So what’s next?

Well, I’ll try to keep up with a post a day, but only if it allows me to keep up post quality.  I’ll strive to share interesting and fun things I find on the web, to post Equanimity updates on a more regular basis.  I’ll also look at how to better engage visitors, what with the last comment on the site being 5 months old. Finally, I hope to take a look at different other mediums available to me for posting (i.e. audio, video), something I’ve always wanted to do.

So, the next couple of months should be quite interesting.  I hope you’ll join me for the ride!

This site allows visitors to start with a sentence.  The sentence is then drawn by another user, then explained by another, drawn again, explained again, etc…  The result is a sometimes awkward, and sometimes hilarious, result of social online telephone.

Check it out for yourself by going to drawception.com.

Here’s one of the games I played.  The starting sentence was “A bunny being forced into prostitution”, and it quickly turned weird…

My Adventures on Drawception

There are half a dozen people in the church: a handful standing outside the confessional and two inside of it.

Ace is standing amongst those who are located outside the confessional. Somehow, however, he can see inside of it, where a priest is sitting to one side, and a sinner asking for forgiveness to the other. Ace does not recognize the priest, but he does recognize the sinner as the scar-covered bald man who stood looking at him from the streets the other night.

The bald man has a gun. It’s hidden on his person so that the priest cannot see it, but Ace knows its there, he is certain of it.

Ace wants to shout to the priest. He wants to warn him of the bald man’s gun, but he is frozen, unable to move. Instead, all he can do is listen as the priest prays for the bald man with a few quiet words.

The bald man quietly pulls the gun from his side. He holds it against his lap, pointing he muzzle directly at the priest, but keeping it out of eyesight of the priest.

Ace eyes grow into large round circles. He tries once more to shout, to screams, even to jump up and down, but his body does not respond to him, and the priest does not notice him, or any of the others standing outside the confessional.

Ace tries to move his head and finds that he can look around. He begins scanning for something he might be able to throw at the confessional in order to get the priest’s attention. As he searches he notices three other people – an elderly couple and a young, blonde woman – staring back at him. He stares at them for a moment before realizing they are not looking at him but rather at something he is holding in his hands. He looks down and, to his surprise, finds he is holding a handgun.

Suddenly, as though unlocking something in his body, Ace is able to move. Without thinking he quickly points the gun in the direction of the confessional, to the side in which the bald man is sitting.

He has to kill the bald man. He has to kill the bald man before he kills the priest.

Ace is scared. A sinister whisper in the back of his mind hints that if he kills the bald man he forfeits his own life. He turns his head towards those that surround him and finds all three looking back at him with a mix of understanding, compassion, and fear. They do not speak, but they do not have to; Ace can see in their eyes that they are all thinking the same thing: the bald man must die.

Everything slows down as the bald man begins to squeeze the trigger. Ace no longer has a choice, and quickly pulls his own trigger before the bald man, who is hesitating, can follow through and shoot the priest. The bullet from Ace’s gun flies through the air, then through the confessional’s wooden front pannel, and finally into the bald man’s temple, splatting out the other side along with bits of blood, brain and skull. The priest shrieks as the bald man drops and dies, an eerie smile appearing on his lips.

Ace doesn’t see the smile. In fact, he cannot see or hear anything anymore. He tastes blood fill his throat and mouth and realizes that someone shot him. He drops his gun, and falls to the floor as a cold numbness covers his entire body. A void of emptiness swallows him whole, and then, nothing.

***

Ace suddenly awoke, throwing his body backwards against the old wooden chair on which he had fallen asleep. The chair buckled but held together, and the retired soldier remained sitting on it for a moment as his consciousness fully returned to him.

The clock against his bed read 1:04am, which meant that he had dozed off for about 15 minutes, the longest he had been able to sleep for since first waking up from the terrifying dream almost two days earlier.

He groggily looked around the apartment, only to find nothing had moved. His door was still bolted shut, the windows were still closed tight, and, except for the lamp by his bed, all the lights were off.

Most importantly, the firearms he’d gathered over the past couple of days were still lying on his bed, just where he had left them. He grabbed one of them and began cleaning it, all the while humming to himself.

There were five more days to go, and he would be ready by then.

For anyone who’s curious, there are currently 8 chapters published, and the total number of chapters once fully published will be around 30.  Pretty crazy when you consider that I first envisioned the story to be no longer than 5 parts long.

You can find all information on the short story by visiting the Equanimity Page.

Fortunately, one of the movies was the original 1958 The Blob, a personal favorite, so it wasn’t a complete loss (though it’s since been removed, and the only thing that can cheer me up is its opening credits).

Beware of the blob
It creeps and  leaps
And flies and slides
Across the floor…

As the service becomes more mature, it’s obviously going to put pressure on existing video rental services out there like Netflix, PSN, XBox Live, and Crackle.  It was therefore no surprise to me last week to see that YouTube and Google Play will be receiving 600 new MGM titles.

Here’s to hoping that additional content becomes available as studios out there begin to truly embrace on demand streaming services. Also, let’s just hope that, as the services become more popular, they don’t deteriorate to the point where they are ridiculously expensive (I’m looking at you PSN) and full of annoying adds (ehem, Crackle and Hulu).

We don’t need the internet to become the next Cable TV.

Truth is, I’ve been  surrounded by great leaders and mentors throughout my professional life, and tend to focus on them when answering such a question.  There is, however, another group of people who I consider to be both great leaders and mentors, though I never actually met them in person.

These people are leaders on the internet, people such as the VlogBrothers or Felicia Day (there are so many I cannot name them all) who, in spite of everything bad that can happen on the internet, have been putting themselves out there for all to critique.  The result is such people end up being positive examples, and in a way mentors, for the slew of people online who want to start their own webseries, blogs, vlogs, websites, etc…  And even these people had their own mentors.

Hank Green, in an early VlogBrothers video, gives credit to zefrank, a web pioneer who himself served as a mentor, leader and inspiration for the brothers (who have since founded Nerdfighters, a social group of over 75k official members from all over the interwebs).  The zefrank video he uses as an example is the following, where zefrank discusses ideas and Brain Crack.

I have to admit that the video definitively served as a wake-up call, helping me realize that I was addicted to Brain Crack myself, and that I needed to get my ideas out there, and not squat on them hoping that they would one day become perfect.

I invite everyone out there to watch the video, the message of which is quite simply: stop thinking about it, get out there and do it! 

The only Rainbow to have ever been successfully incarcerated at the new Rainbow Prison. The rainbow escaped a few minutes after this picture was taken, slowly floating on westward.

Michael Hastner, the man behind the controversial 13km/h speed limit and $100 pedestrian crossing fee, had done it again, and this time, his idea was ingenious (or so he thought).

After having been fired from his road-sign manager position, he’d found himself walking the streets unemployed and depressed.  He spend most of his days sitting on downtown park benches, looking at people as they walked busily between their respective destinations.

Michael quickly began to realize that people were always buzzing around, either on their cellphones, laptops, or tablets.  They rarely spoke to each other, instead focusing on their busy lives and jobs.  

Then, one day, something extraordinary happened: shortly after a thunderstorm, a rainbow appeared in the sky, and the busy workers, who had always been so productive, found themselves taken aback by the natural beauty of the rainbow.

Michael estimated that the loss in productivity due to the rainbow cost the city and state many working-days of productivity, and set out on a mission to convince community leaders that rainbows were bad.  The result of his crusade would be the new State of the Art Rainbow Prison, a large open space in downtown Montreal whose purpose it was to incarcerate rainbows so they could not distract hard working people, and in turn, hurt the city’s GDP.

Then yesterday I found out about CISPA, which is apparently some kind of SOPA wannabe, and that, along with ACTA, PIPA, and all the other movement as of late we see from organizations trying to control the internet, has me worried that time is short for the internet as we know it today.

Here’s a video giving an overview of CISPA.  I suggest you watch it.

I don’t want to bother you all with another rant on the subject, or at least not this very moment.  Instead I’ll link you to an article that discusses Sergey Brin’s opinion on the subject.  The article is a little short, but does detail some good points, which are very similar to my thoughts on the matter.

Read about how Sergey Brin is worried about the internet here.

For those of you who may not know, Sergey is one of the co-founders of Google.