The internet’s a weird fucking place and that’s mostly because it’s not really a “place.”  It’s absurd as shit and almost equally as fascinating when, one day, you simply realize that it’s the primary source for all of your information about what people are doing in the “real” world.  The computer is one of the first items that people head toward after they’ve done anything, just so that they can report to the virtual world that it’s just occurred and get validated, as if any meaning will evaporate otherwise.  That is, of course, if they don’t already have a smart phone, which allows them to report from it immediately, or even while these mundane events are still occurring.  It’s amazing how technology has managed to make a phone call even less personal and indirect than they were before.  [Remember the AT&T ads where the marketing angle was exactly the reverse.]  People have invested endless portions of their lives towards traveling this superhighway like Neil Cassady and becoming proficient survivalists in this world like some sort of Bear Grylls / Kevin Flynn hybrid.  Their fingers are on the electronic pulse and seem to know the moment that anything with any level of longstanding importance is generated, along with every fetal meme and the moment that each African green monkey cyber sneezes out a new strain of viral sensation.  These people are called “nerds” and, fortunately or otherwise, all of us have slowly grown closer and closer to epitomizing that term over the last 2 decades.  Most people seem to catch the hype during it’s peak, or even on it’s way out, like walking holographic corpses with the progeriatric life-spans of the digital age.  Those of us who fall somewhere in-between, either become aware of the new media by having it sent to us like a package or stumble across it like a pothole, possibly even getting nicked in the side of the head by it like low-hovering space-junk.  One such anomaly that’s really gained prominence over the last couple of years is the online crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com and, while I’ve often been unsure of what to make of it, the latest project by Seattle-based rock outfit, Helms Alee, has managed to officially validate it’s entire existence for me. Read the rest of this entry →