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Found in the Trash: A Box of Otherworldly Notes

In "Nostalgia" 

You know why the internet is awesome? Because you can share the experience of someone discovering a mysterious treasure. Reddit user TramStopDan documented and shared his recent experience of unlocking and discovering the contents of a box which his friend found discarded on the street next to the trash. When he managed to open it, Dan found a mind-boggling collection of posters, illustrations, text, maps technical drawings and personal belongings.

Speculating on the original owner of the case, Dan writes: “Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable. It measures roughly 29″ by 38″ and almost all the drawings are very large… It appears that he was making a diorama/tabletop display. (Why? I have no idea). There are numbered parts and instructions/explanations.”

So let’s take a peak at what he found…

Pretty normal so far…

Text on a poster with corrections and a few eyebrow-raisers to quote, such as, “…but after 12 years it developed that this picture of an obvious other-world invasion…”

‘Fairly small maps, hand-drawn on a clear-ish plastic-like material.’

They all have a hole in the middle, to be overlaid on something else.

Hmmm…

Getting weirder… (or cooler) …

And as Dan puts it, “begin the crazy”…

“Now things start to get a little odd. It seams that the artist saw something in Tampa, FL in 1977 that changed him … This appears to be an early sketch of the event”. 

“An obvious blending of the religious and the extraterrestrial…”

One Reddit commenter had this theory to add:
Apparently the guy went slightly insane over finding extraterrestrials in the bible. He was obsessed with “living creatures” described in Ezekiel 10 that are described as having four faces: “the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.” I guess he really wanted for that to be an alien encounter.

Also found in the briefcase was this technical drawing that looks like a patent application, quite large and very detailed. Dan looked but could not find any registered patent of this design.

So there’s your daily dose of “what the heck am I looking at?!”

Don’t Give It Away for Free!

by Jillian Steinhauer 

Detail of Jessica Hische’s shouldiworkforfree.com flowchart (screenshot by the author, © Jessica Hische)

Last week, a New York Times opinion piece fired up my Facebook newsfeed. Titled “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” and penned by Tim Kreider, the piece pleads with writers not to indulge in that pervasive and pernicious cultural habit: writing for free.
Kreider’s op-ed is funny, smart, and over-the-top, which occasionally leads to some stretching of his argument. (He compares his situation with that of his sister the pulmonologist, saying no one asks her to perform a free lobectomy in her spare time, but I’m not quite sure I buy the comparison.) It also leads to gems that any writer struggling to eke out a living will savor:

This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct.

And this:

Not getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let’s call the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed.

Kreider ends with a rallying cry asking other writers not to give it away for free, so as to help lift the boat for all of us, or however that metaphor goes.
When I read Kreider’s piece, part of me immediately wanted to trumpet his message everywhere; another part of me admitted all too readily that the issue is complicated. In this day and age, writing for free brings with it real benefits, the most obvious of which is the chance to write for money; that’s how mine and I’m sure countless other careers started.
People tend to blame the internet for the downfall of the livable writing wage, which I think is probably accurate. People also tend to laud the internet for bringing a greater number and wider range of voices into the cultural conversation, which I think is probably accurate as well. But writing — like art — still has a major diversity problem, as well as a gender one. We remain far from the utopian democratization proposed by the evangelists of Web 2.0.
One aspect of the diversity-in-writing discussion that I’ve found noticeably absent is any mention of class, most likely because you’d need real, hard data to understand the economic backgrounds of working writers. But I venture to guess that if you did have the results, you’d find a whole lot of people who come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds and not so many from lower.
Choosing writing as a profession is an economic risk. Having a safety net, like a family you’re pretty sure won’t let you don’t end up homeless, helps. Easy access to education also helps, both emotionally (confidence) and materially (contacts, connections). A sense of entitlement definitely doesn’t hurt. A recent opinion piece in the Guardian by Chris Arnade, a Wall Street banker–turned–photographer, was overly simplistic but made a solid point:

I am able to take risks as an artist because I have money. … we rarely hear the stories of the poor as told by them. If they are told, it is by other artists who come into the neighborhood and interpret what they see.

Paying writers — and artists, and musicians, and photojournalists, etc. — matters, for a myriad of reasons. One of the strongest is that, without it, we’ll never really achieve that long-overdue democratization. Not until we find a way to make these creative pursuits viable professions.


http://hyperallergic.com/90638/dont-give-it-away-for-free/