I suppose I’ll go down the list:
THE SIGNALS: A GUIDED PRIMER
This is interesting because my impression from the couple of read-throughs I’ve done is that… the people who wrote this are somehow adapting what makes physical spaces good to virtual spaces. I find that funny considering the focus of last week’s article, which is that we should go beyond trying to just recreate physical communication.
Thinking about it further, though, they’re not quite talking about the same thing. The Signals is about… how to make any sort of space a successful one, kind of philosophically speaking, rather than about the actual methodology of facilitating interactions.
What can I say? You can’t argue against this kind of goodwill-fostering stuff without seeming like a huge curmudgeon. I will say I wish these people had been a little more… concrete with what they were talking about. It reads like someone’s entry for a Google design challenge, and I’d like to see some more about how this kind of stuff gets implemented.
DIALUP:
As of now I’m still waiting for a call, I wanted to do Wednesday’s intro call before anything else.
I’m really pleasantly surprised by the UI and general layout and concept of this app though! Going in I thought it’d be kind of like… Omegle or Chatroulette, where you’re randomly paired with one person. And when I think of telephone calls they’re always very single, isolated things. The idea of building a community out of something like a telephone call is something I wouldn’t have thought of, but I’m glad they did.
I really, really like that the calls are not very frequent (weekly?) and that they’re at a set time. At the end of the day I think too much convenience has actually put some strain on our relationships; knowing I can message my mother or friend anytime (and in fact might be expected to do so) makes everything that I say more… diluted? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it’s true for more than romantic feelings. Any kind of meaning grows in scarcity.
Update: I did the call on Wednesday night and ended up talking for almost three hours with the person. They were a person from Quebec, and it was amazing! Dialup has my seal of approval.
THREE JS SCENE:
In building this I was thinking of how when it’s raining you often end up huddled together with a bunch of other people while you wait for it to stop (pre-covid at least). And there are always a few adventurous people who just decide to brave the rain. So I wanted to create a little space in the middle of the rain where people could stay together, and then some other stuff way out in the distance people could go check out if they so desired. At the moment I only got the bus stop, the skymap, and the rain in though (the rain is very audible in the scene, but I think less so on YouTube).
