February 2012 – Rory Parle

February 28, 2012

A Show with Ze Frank

Thanks to Kickstarter, Ze Frank will soon be making new episodes of the show with zefrank. Or at least a show with Ze Frank.

The show was one of the earliest successful video blogging endeavours, starting way back in March 2006. After previously experiencing viral media success with How to Dance Properly, Frank decided to record a video blog every weekday for an entire year. The resulting show covered such diverse topics as intelligent design, the war in Iraq, and dressing up your vacuum to look like a person. It was also the origin of the Earth Sandwich—where people on opposite sides of the world used GPS to accurately place two slices of bread and enclose the entire planet in a sandwich—which is what first hooked me as a fan.

Every weekday is a lot. There are 262 episodes of the show, mostly between two and three minutes long, making the whole thing about 11 hours long. It’s longer than the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that took 438 days to film (principal photography only).

As you might expect given the time constraints, some episodes didn’t hit a very high quality bar. But there were also some truly excellent episodes. If you’ve never seen the show before you could do worse than to get a feeling for it from my favourite, “scrabble”.

Milton Bradley is of course famous for having come in second place in the Least Fun Name for a Toy Company Ever competition.

Even if you missed the show, it’s possible that you’ll recognize Frank from his 2010 TED talk, where he talked about a lot of the experiments he did in involving his audience in his projects.

Nearly six years after the show first started, and five years since it finished, we’re going to get something new. The Kickstarter project has already beaten its funding goal of $50,000—although there are some pretty cool rewards in the offering if you want to push the total a little higher by backing it yourself—so it’s pretty much guaranteed to happen. It promises three episodes a week of “same same, but different”.

The web has changed a huge amount in five years. You can tell that just by comparing the resolution of the Kickstarter promo video to that of an average episode of the show. But it has also changed with respect to how people engage with each other online.

In March 2006, Facebook was still limited to college and highschool students. Twitter started in the same month as the show. The web was more divided, with some people being creators and others silent consumers. The show fought against that tendency by encouraging audience members to contribute and to change its direction. These days almost everyone posts things online, so it will be interesting to see what effect a more participatory audience has on the nature of the new show.

February 9, 2012

I feel like a military academy

I’ve taken an unplanned break from my monthly challenge (of eating no meat) today. I’m reluctant to break a successful streak, but when it comes to playing with your diet there are always going to be health concerns to keep in mind.

This morning I took the tube to work during rush hour. Usually I’m in late enough in the morning to miss the biggest part of the rush, but on Thursdays I play football before work so I end up on a packed tube with all of the other commuters.

I’ve just started listening to the audiobook of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Haunted”, which is a collection of short stories or a dark and horrific nature. The part I was listening to today was particularly disturbing, to the extent that I won’t even try to give you the gist of it. I started to feel nauseous. At the time I attributed this to the writing being especially evocative, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure it was just a coincidence. This was somewhere between Camden Town and Euston. I switched off the audiobook in favour of some less disturbing music and decided to take a few minutes at Euston to get some air before I switched to the Victoria line to continue my journey.

(Scene missing)

Then I woke up on the floor of a tube carriage with a crowd of people looking over me. Well I can tell you that’s one heck of a disorienting experience. I’ve complained before about Londoners’ ability to ignore each other, especially on the tube, but I take it all back. If you ever want to interact with your fellow Londoners, passing out in front of them is an effective way to get some attention.

I don’t know for sure what caused my impromptu nap. Maybe the book really was that gross. Maybe I’m coming down with something. My guess is it was a lack of blood sugar, or a lack of iron.

I skipped breakfast at home this morning so I could get some more sleep. That’s not at all unusual for me, but since I’ve given up meat I’ve found myself much less able to go for long periods without eating than I normally can. Note to self: no more skipping meals. Lack of iron would be pretty easily explained: it’s hard to avoid iron in meaty foods, but easy to miss otherwise.

I bought a few cookies from a cookie stand in Euston to give my blood sugar a kick, and then took a bus the rest of the way to work to avoid being in a crowded, poorly ventilated tube. I got in in time to get a cooked breakfast, so I had a pile of bacon and sausages and scrambled egg. I’ve been drinking cans of Coke all morning too, as that’s what they give you after you donate blood to stop you from fainting. I’ll get some steak for dinner today just to make completely sure I’ve replaced all the missing nutrients.

Once I feel completely sure I’ve addressed everything that’s wrong, I’ll restart the challenge, with a new awareness of the importance of certain nutrients, and a hard-and-fast no skipping meals rule.

February 1, 2012

February’s challenge

Yesterday I talked about how my monthly challenge for January—giving up alcohol—had gone. I finished by saying that, “next month will have a much tougher challenge.” Now that a day has passed, that “next month” is this month, and the tougher challenge has begun: I have given up eating meat.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from talking about this with friends and colleagues it’s that everyone is sure they know exactly what that means, but many people are wrong. So here are some clarifications:

Poultry is meat.
Fish (including shellfish) is meat.
So are insects, although giving up eating those won’t be a stretch.
Eggs are not meat.
Gelatine is not meat.

Those last two are important. I’ve deliberately stated this challenge as not eating meat, as distinct from going vegetarian. I don’t want to spend a month reading ingredients lists looking for gotchas. I just want to push myself into exploring new food options by denying myself the ones I usually tend towards.

One day in, I’m feeling optimistic. There’s a risk in the first days of the month that I’ll forget about the challenge while on auto-pilot at the cafés in work, but if I manage to pay enough attention to stop myself grabbing some meat out of sheer habit I think I’ll manage with this one just fine.