You’ll also notice my Post-it also says a Klout score above 70. I used to give Klout a hard time about a year ago when it came out. People in the professional Social Media arena and measurement communities do not like this service because supposedly there’s “no such thing as a social media guru” and there’s “no way to measure the ROI of social media.” I agree with what they are saying, but Klout (and Kred) are definitely the beginnings of a measurement system. (Hell, I can’t complain, Klout gives me free stuff based on my score, and for this I am grateful.) As you can see, score of 70+ is also on my goals sheet, and it should help me in achieving my following.

All social media is networked, connected; a collective of snapshots from your physical life neatly organized for consumption. Deep down I always knew this, but I am seeing it more and more in my daily life. I am trying to stay as even as I can on my networks, been beefing up the Yelp reviews as well; trying to stay well rounded. My strategy for my Twitter follower goal is to engage on multiple levels on multiple networks and funnel things back to Twitter. Maybe “funnel” is the wrong word to use, since Twitter is another gateway to my social media links. I should “corral people to one of my many hubs.”

Derek signing off!

DJ Mehdi

I was looking through some music and the late DJ Mehdi came up in my playlist. It made me think back to a time when I saw him play with A-Trak on new years in LA in 2010 (or was it 2011?), where he introduced me to the song: Le Le – Breakfast. I remember the exact moment the track started playing with accompanied video track on-stage; It was magical. The entire dance floor stopped and stared, and it immediately turned into a party filled with laughter, good vibes, and a sick flowing rap. A huge thanks to you, Mehdi, you are missed and you changed my life that night! You are definitely somebody!

Rest in peace.

I learned a lot about money and time this year. Life has a funny way of throwing a barrage of papers and projects at you at one moment, and the next second there are crickets. This year has been full of it’s very high highs and very low lows. I have been living on the bleeding edge of extreme this year (YEAAAH EXTREEEEME!), and it was exhilarating!

The hardest part of this professional year (besides the dual-life I lead for about 6 months), was October and November. I was taking on new responsibilities and more projects; there were more shoots. I was learning to animate in After Effects — I’d say I hit my goal of getting my feet wet with this program — and delivering projects the same day. It was extremely rewarding, but extremely draining.

Socially, this year was not as fruitful as others. It seems like I am slipping further and further into the Facebook world. I don’t know if this is good or not. I seem to have communication with more people than ever imagined, but I am, in fact, seeing less-and-less people face-to-face. I want to make next year a year of strengthening the bonds between my closest friends. I did throw a lot of parties this year (due to the good cash flow), and we had many great times, but I want to start getting to know people 1 on 1. I have been lacking in this area, mostly because of this rocky financial and professional year; but this is just a convenient excuse. I had plenty of time to make time for people in my circles.

Socially further, I have started to pick up Spanish. Largely in part due to my wonderful girlfriend of 4 1/2 years, who is Mexican. I have been going to more and more family events, being exposed to more and more Spanish. I’ve started watching Spanish television and listening to Spanish music. Also, Rosetta stone helps build my vocabulary and Google Translate helps me understand some colloquialisms. Mostly, Angie has been my maestra in this regard. For this I am grateful!

My favorite video of the year:

John Cleese: A Lecture on Creativity

Happy New Years y Feliz Año Nuevo!

I never looked up the lyrics to Justice’s relatively new single “Civilization.” The song is actually quite deep lyrically, and I love the sound they’ve created melodically. The chorus deals with the core of what we call ‘civilization’. Most ‘civilized’ nations have been taken over by force; not just physically, but mentally; ideals shattered; forced to live within the bounds of an alien point of view. What powerful lyrics this song contains.

Have a listen below, and read along with the lyrics. Most of all, enjoy!

(Verse)
Stand in line as we march to the drums of the east,
Paralyzed and possesed by crusadors deceased,
Lost in the silence, the call from the turbulent times.
Bound by the science that lives on… that lives on the wise.

(CHORUS x2)
The beating of a million drums.
The fire of a million guns.
The mother of a million sons.

(Verse)
Lost in the silence, they bow to the call of the east.
Tantalized and seduced by the demons released.
ears to the ground by the name of the merciless guide (sky).
Onto the fire that burns in the all seeing eye.

(CHORUS x2)

Bridge

(chorus x3)

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

A prime example now is in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Their “competitive” matchmaking system seemed like a programmer dreamt up the system in his sleep (or on a peyote trip/drinking binge), pitched it to the head guy over at Valve, gained approval, and just coded it himself; no teamwork, no consideration to the gamer community, just plain old thoughtless. The main problems are a system that pairs you up with 9 other individuals (5 versus 5) and it takes forever. It used to take 1-2 seconds (literally); now it takes anywhere from 45 seconds to 10 minutes! Once the matchmaking system finally finds 9 others and a suitable server for all, you can play your match. But here’s where it gets good: if one person leaves, it poses the question to all players “Would you like to continue this match?” with a bot replacing the open slot. The vote must be unanimous, or the game is abandoned. I have only completed one match with this new system; all others have been a huge waste of time.

This is a prime example of the perpetual beta of games today, franchises care only about monetary gain and not of the quality of work. I’m sick of it and I miss the days where coders took the painstaking hours/months/years to craft their game and release it to the public; polished, all-things-considered, and most of all enjoyable. The gamers would play it, find exploits (generally minimal), and developers (and often the community) would release a game patch or game modification. Over the long 12 year life of the original Counter-Strike (v1.1, v1.3, v1.4, 1.5, 1.6), patches were released far and few between, but they were polished; all varnish removed. Today, CS:GO updates almost every other day. This is unacceptable.

Super Monday Night Combat

To get back on track,  ”matchmaking” is one of the WORST ideas in gaming. I’ve always favored choice in the world of gaming. Another example is a smaller game called Super Monday Night Combat, created and maintained by Uber Entertainment (Uberent). They’ve implemented a matchmaking system that takes ages to find any sort of match. Once the system does find suitable opponents, the matches are generally lopsided. This almost always causes people to leave, and here’s the kicker: Once they leave, the slot is forever ‘filled’ until the match is over. To clarify, once someone leaves your team mid-match, you have to finish the game a person short; and you generally will find yourself outmatched and outnumbered. Something that is a large problem for the community over at Uber Entertainment and Super Monday Night Combat.

To conclude, gaming developers and gaming franchises need to get in touch with the old school gamer; ask them what they think, take into consideration what makes games so disposable today. Either fix these matchmaking systems or nix them completely because they are causing people to jump ship and seek out greener pastures. A simple menu item, setting, or feature can make or break a game. What fun are great graphics, good gameplay and a good community with a faulty matchmaking system? It all doesn’t make sense and seems to be headed in the wrong direction.

Don’t even get me started on the Call of Duty games franchise and their self hosted ‘solution’…pathetic. Not everyone is the casual Xbox gamer…

Dream Music, Part 1 from Marc Donahue on Vimeo.

Dream Music: Part 2 from Marc Donahue on Vimeo.

An attempt at taking a serious approach to a subject matter that’s been around and visible in forum threads, social media websites, video games and webcam-chat settings for quite some time, but while I believe that it is an important new space for creative expression [...] The topics I engage with range from creative self-portraiture, to whimsical memes, digital “translations” of my hand-drawn work, cats, and straight psychedelia.

In an attempt to better understand where his ideas for this wonderful fabrication come from, I began a short dialogue with him to pick his brain on the subject of art and of internet, and how the two intertwine.

Cover of TinyLife: Studies in Avatars and Digital Portraiture

Q1: First of all, what’s your name, who are you, what are you all about? Give me a brief intro as to why we should care

My presence as an electronic creative is known by the handle Gangster Computer God, a name which I came across in the intensely imaginative and paranoid rantings of Mr. Francis E. Dec, Esq. In these rants the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God is described as a sort of pan-technological entity who is manipulating all activity on Earth, possessing everybody’s real brains in a “brain bank city on the far side of the moon” and letting their electrically controlled bodies walk around down on the planet imagining themselves to be free-acting persons. We don’t really understand why but the motive behind this and numerous other historical atrocities that Gangster Computer God is said to have its hand in appears to be nothing shy of complete control of the entire planetary system, and secrecy is the name of the game – nobody is supposed to know that Gangster Computer God is running everything behind the scenes, and it would appear that its control is necessarily contingent on nobody ever finding out.

I’ve been producing electronic music under the name Gangster Computer God since early 2005, but from the get-go the aim of the Gangster Computer God project has been to cultivate an aesthetic around digital lifestyles and the politics of the user, developing a lens through which to relate to the 21st century as active participants – and this has always been a multimedia endeavor. From the beginning there has been Gangster Computer God art, but the idea of what it means to visually represent this idea has evolved over time along with the music and the happenings.

Question 2: Tell us more about your book. 

 So this little art book is the latest development in all of this. I try to tackle a universal issue in art, that of portraits and self-portraiture, through the specificity of the 21st century experience, and the unique portrait style of the 21st century is the avatar. If you use blogs, BBS, forums, video or text chat, or if you use Twitter or Facebook, sooner or later you end up putting a little picture on a profile to stand for yourself in the digital world, and this is called an avatar. Some people just use untouched photographs of themselves, but what can fit in that space has a huge open potential, and you find that sometimes people use pictures of where they are or where they’ve been, pictures of favorite bands or musicians, or of video game characters, cats, or original artwork, to represent who they are. This is quite a departure from what a portrait meant to Rembrandt, or Lucian Freud or even to Picasso, because now you can pick virtually anything to stand in as a self-representation.

Assuming a condition of deep technological immersion, the problem of what to choose for an avatar when you can choose anything is really what I’m addressing with this book. What is personhood on the web? Often it is disembodied, spatially displaced, even anonymous – I wanted the art in this book to reflect these conditions. Identity becomes this very creative, fractured phenomenon; hypothetically you could represent as a sweet caring person on one website and portray yourself as a virulent angry racist in an online game, and still be known by your birth name and biographical details elsewhere. In fact that’s not hypothetical, I know quite a few people who do just that! I wanted to acknowledge in my art this tendency to create imaginative personas as a part of the 21st century individual’s way of trekking through and inhabiting the digital landscape. I wanted to address the culture of meme creation, the internet’s inside jokes, so this book also features pieces that play around with the sort of catch-phrasing and framing that get used when people set about to create and share meme pictures and the like online.

Question 3: What is the theory behind making a 8.5cm x 5.5cm sized book? Are you insane!?!?

Ultimately, this book boils down to 80 high-definition full-color prints across 40 pages, and is handcrafted like a zine. In keeping with the spirit of the internet adventure, I chose to make all of these images using a webcam image manipulation software, ManyCam v2.6.65. Already the nature of ManyCam is to generate these relatively small digital images using a limited but powerful palette of manipulation tools – but then you end up sending that digital image over to a chat site or post a picture up on a web gallery and it gets smaller still. I wanted the art in this book to reflect the way one might experience it if they were to actually encounter it “in the wild,” so to speak, online. I don’t want to lose sight of the Gangster Computer God mission statement, to engage in discussion with and development of the aesthetic and ethical ways in which we engage with all things technological in the 21st century, and I wanted the miniature dimensions of this book (it’s smaller than a cassette) to reflect that engagement. Plus it’s super cute!

Am I insane? It would be hard for me to deny my rampant eccentricity, but I think we need to make a distinction here. I can’t believe that I’m doing this but I’m gonna quote my main man Malaclypse the Younger on this one: “I may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I’m mad but not ill.” Foucault wants us to recognize that insanity is really a political designation before all else, that we tend to use this idea to make claims about the validity of a person’s ideas or their capacity to bear their own rights as an individual. Am I neurotic? Who isn’t? But am I psychotic? No. I am psychedelic.

A digital feedback landscape

For more information on purchasing Computer Gangster God’s TinyLife: Studies in Avatars and Digital Portraiture please visit the book’s Etsy page! Only $10!

The inset reads:

 ”The avatar is intrinsic to persona in a digital world. The images in this book are explorations of an emerging landscape within which the subject evolves to engage in digital lifestyles.”