The Bunge

For Joe’s fiction writing class, he had to write a 15-sentence story which begins “morgan is the kind of person who…”

By Joe Gleason

Morgan is the kind of person who feels compelled to be hugging someone whenever her picture is taken.

Judging from her Facebook profile, you’d think that she is the life of every party. She isn’t. One benefit of going away for college, however, is that she no longer has any one friend who knows all of her other friends – a fact which she has used to her advantage by creating six additional Facebook accounts with which she frequently comments on her own photos or writes on her own wall. “Why didn’t you call me last night?? =)” asks non-existent Terri Bradshaw from NYU. “Happy birthday, babe – you’re gorgeous! xoxoxo” comments Patrick Dampsey, her super cute, completely imaginary boyfriend. “Damn, grrl, you look HOTTT,” writes Tyler Darden (she’d just seen Fight Club after buying the movie poster), referencing her new photo album entitled “Good Times, Good Times!!!!” And while she can’t remember the name of that bitch she was hugging in the photo, she is almost certain it was one of the American Girls, so she’s tentatively tagged her as “Felicity” because it sounds more sophisticated than Addy or Molly. And sometimes, (oh, this is embarrassing even to write) she has her nearly-real friends communicate not only with her, but with each other. Like, wouldn’t Facebook think it’s a little weird that all seven of these accounts have the exact same password (Carebear12345) and six of them are pictureless with only one friend – her? She’s got to cover her tracks. Now, most of the time, their interactions are limited to such greetings as “Hell yeah!” or “LOL!!”, but occasionally, they take on more significance. In a flourish of creative genius, she has recently guided Terri Bradshaw and Patrick Dampsey through a growing feud over which of them likes Morgan the most.

It’s been bitter and hard to watch, but in the end, though she’d never admit it to Terri, Morgan has to say that Patrick totally took the cake when he created a new Facebook group entitled “Morgan for President – 2016!” There are currently seven members.

Comments(3)

Last month I saw a documentry titled, Beautiful Losers at the Walker. Recently the producers from the film also came and presented it to the employees and producers at my internship. Since I saw the movie, I’ve been obsessing about creativity. Mike Mills, who is one of the 14 artists the film focuses on says, “the dispossessed inherit the creative earth.” The point, like the title of the movie suggests, is that only through lacking something do you need to create. Its those people in high school who aren’t quite satisfied with life, not the football player with the cheerleader girl friend, who needs to make things. Seems to make sense to me. In retrospect, not saying I was popular, I wish I was your most downcast classmate in high school. I would have made some good art!

Lastly, go make something today. Lay out your ideas, create, forget the process and have fun. Fail. Create again.

In the next 7 years or so, Minneapolis is going to spend a chunk of change on new stadiums and transportation. After painful construction, legislation, and probably a few years of delays, this city will look pretty awesome. Being a big fan of conceptual drawing and architecture, I gathered a bunch of photos of the city to be.

Also my friend Dan “Da-Man” Ficker wrote a sweet post about the Mall of America Expansion.

Here is what the Gopher stadium and hopeful extension of the Minneapolis Light Rail (The Central Corridor) will look like. There is talk that the rail will have a station under Coffman Memorial Union and tunnel under the U of M campus. It then would come up near the new stadium, but budget cuts might force them to build around campus. MPR says the design won’t be finalized for 2 years.

TCF Bank Stadium

Central Corridor

The Light Rail is the dotted line running long the bottom.

Twins Stadium

“Twinsville”

What the site looks like now

Comments(1)

Here are my notes from the “Engagement Media Front” presentation by Laurence Bricker, the chief experience officer for Popular Front.
He has some interesting thoughts about new media. The points below are loosely connected.

• Media is moving away from the push model. (show up and watch the 10 o’clock news)
• Moving towards the seek model (drive your own media)
• Used to be a few to many. (when Walter Cronkite said something, we believed it.)
• Now there are many media (yes that’s the plural form) to many people.
• Media are fragmenting and now flattening into unified media landscape
• Wild West stage of this “webcentric” model.
• We’ll see clients directly connected to consumer. They are no longer borrowing time from NBC to advertise ads but are making their own time.
• We now have to potential to create a collaborative or individualistic society.
• In the future, a million people in one place will be a valuable audience (which is not much which shows segmentation).
• Tech is going to be a background support. Now it is just a pain in the butt.
• Time is the new currency.
• It takes 9 times to remember something and frequency was the norm (SPAM etc.). Now relevancy is going to be the norm.
• Its not that we don’t want to see ads just not things we don’t care about.
• Search is important (Google) but now experience is more important (Popular Front).
• Audiences are now gathering virally. Online environment makes it super easy to send links and spread the word. If its good, it will get around.
• Audiences will see shared environments among product partnerships
• The problems with current web environment is everyone thinks their competition knows something they don’t and just copy each other. That’s why the interactive evolution has been so slow.

Comments(1)