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August 17, 2004

Welcome to your Shiny New Future!

“The promise of a bright shiny new future. Has it been fulfilled? In the nineteen fifties, when the baby boomer generation began to become aware of the world, this promise was held out to us at the same time that our minds were being collectively scared by the prospect of large radioactive bugs coming through our bedroom windows. Our mothers, not yet enlightened by liberation or freedom of the sexes, were admonished to be content with the numerous shiny new “labor saving devices” rapidly filling up the shelves of the local appliance store.”

I wrote the words above for one of the relaunches of my Cultural Blender website in 2003. The original page on my server is here. On the original page, my “spinning globe icon”, which is an AllThingsMike trademark, was positioned on the plate. I’ve just tried to repeadedly position it there in this post, but my HTML coding keeps getting screwed up, and now I’m at work, so I’ll leave this post as is. The spinning globe is below, instead of layered on the plate. I “composited” the housewife, which is an image borrowed from one of my favorite websites of all time, www.lileks.com. It is composited over a kitchen “set” I designed using a number of pieces and hand drawn elements, and the “cultural blender” is my original “composite” for the cultural blender site. I have been thinking of getting back to adding some content to the Blender. This was one of my “project websites” which was, like most of them, created in a fit of splendiferous imagination, then left hanging in cyberspace. The idea of the “shiny new future” and of the “cultural blender” is to illustrate the propensity for all cultural iconography to be “blended”, “mixed” and “pureed” into new forms of cultural expression.

On the main page of the site, I wrote, in 2001, that the blender site is ”A Treatise based on the assumption that there is no cultural trend or reference used today that didn’t exist in another form either ten or twenty years ago, or ten or twenty minutes ago, and was copy/pasted into it’s present existence”

. Someday soon I want to get back to the editor and create some new pages. The “sections” on the Blender deal with modern cultural history, how we revere our “icons”, like Elvis and Marilyn, and I put up sections with old advertisements and developed a rather ambitious set of essays for the “Cartoons” section which I never wrote. I did create many composites using cartoon characters from 100 years of animation. Funny how the whole thing just never came together. Too many ideas, and not enough execution. The internet is my canvas, but sometimes the brushes are dry!

There is also the beginnings of essays on Television and the media on the site. As I say, too many ideas, and not enough time to birth them into fruition. I can remember the “idea” of all the cultural icons in the blender itself, which is featured on the above image. I chose over a hundred “images” and triaged them until I came up with a suitable mix for insertion in the blender. It took a while, and I’m still proud of the idea, although the blender image I used is too tall.

I am not pleased with the first page of the Cultural Blender site, and the coding needs to be changed. But since I’m looking to redesign again, thought I’d mention it on the blog. I don’t think there are too many links on AllThingsMike to the “Shiny Future” image, so this is “new” for all intents and purposes. Wish I could figure out how I positioned the spinning globe above the plate, but it’s getting too late to experiement anymore.