Dan the Man

Dan Lucal.

Is the...

man!

Let's think about how it is today. You're sitting at the TV trying to decide what to watch. If you have a newspaper or TV Guide nearby, you might pick that up and peruse it over. Or if not, you might flip to the electronic version on television, assuming you have cable, or you might simply just channel-surf.

Even the most channel laden cable station is likely to have no more than the fabled nirvana of 500 channels, and more likely 100 maybe 150.

The point? You can view all the (time-sensitive) content in about two minutes of remote control repetitive strain thumb pressing.

But these days, there's an alternative. No, no, not the DVD player, but the Web. The web's been around (popularly) for a little over ten years. I'd say, by 1994, you could start to visit some websites.

However, in those days, you had about one web browser (Mosaic) and bandwidth was deadly slow. This meant watching a webpage with two images download from a website was like watching paint dry. Or reading this blog. It was interminable.

Then came Netscape, and things were better, because the folks at Netscape realized that people were impatient, but they'd be far more patient if they could see a little progress. HCI 101, my friends. So, these images would appear line by line, slowly forming on a page, but at least you could read the page while waiting for your latest porn, er, artistic nudes, er, clothing-challenged images to download (my goodness, Rover, I never knew you had no clothing! --ruff!)

Then, came great bandwidth. And with great bandwidth comes great responsibility! No, seriously, it comes with not having to see those images slowly trickle in. Ten years of high speed Internet and servers that could deal with the load has resulted in webpages that load zippity doo dah fast, and the good old days of paint-drying-image downloads are safely in the past.

In that same time, the amount of stuff you can get on the web has grown exponentially, which means you can't do the equivalent of channel-surfing. You'd go through plenty of pages of Craig's List before hitting anything meaningful.

Of course, sharing the meteoric rise of the Web was search engines. Back in the day, people would argue whether you should search with Lycos or AltaVista or, well, who even remembers what search engines were around then. Google became king of search, and that was that.

But, still, there's a problem. What if you want to see the equivalent of TV on the Internet? Searching for information content is pretty good. Searching for entertainment content, not so good.

And entertainment content is starting to make a lot of progress, primarily because of cheap video equipment, cheap editing equipment, well, pretty much cheap everything. Kids now make films with special effects, music, editing, the works.

What prevents the content from being any good is simply lack of cohesive talent. Go watch the end credits of Lord of the Rings.

Go on.

I'll wait.

OK, fine, that probably took ten minutes, and involved more people than likely graduated from your high school. Tons of talented people spending way too many hours in New Zealand making hobbits look good.

What's a poor boy to do? Most people who are putting content up have to be one-man shows, where they do pretty much everything. Acting, singing, editing, more editing, webpage development. It helps to be multi-talented, because you ain't got the friends nor the money to do anything better.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. There's a corollary that says desperation and poverty are the mothers (no, it's OK to have two mamas in Maryland now) of creativity on the cheap.

Which brings me back to...

Dan...Lucal...is...

The Man!

OK, I found Dan's site recently because he posted some stuff to You Tube. Right now, You Tube seems to be the video content provider of choice even if their interface (and Google's) suck a**. That lead me back to his own site, which is:

thedan.com

Let me link a few videos for you to see. The first is basically an ad for his own website:

Com Dan Thee movie

Yes, he's doing his own lyrics and dancing and bad lip synching.

A good second video retells the story of a guy who took some hostages at a Sam Goody. Dan plays all roles in this one:

Dan tells about Dominic

Oh, one more, for my bro, who likes juggling. Let's face it. Once I discovered Dan was into juggling, this is the kind of related behavior I might expect (jugglers draws geeky show-offs, but are generally harmless).

Dan juggles five!

(Note: brother can also juggle five, about as skillfully as Dan).

While the songs give you a sense of Dan's creativity, try visiting the rest of his website. In particular, segments in "The Dan TV".

Dan's a cross between Jim Carrey and Jon Heder (that's Napoleon Dynamite. You know. Napo..oh never mind).

To be honest, I don't know who Dan is. He has links to Harvard and MIR, so maybe he's out in Boston. Or something.

But the point is this. Creativity from the masses is likely to come from small one-man operations where the lead guy invites a few friends from time to time.

And these days, with editing equipment readily available, people can do effects that would have been modestly impossible (or expensive) years ago, slow mo, cuts, dissolves, lighting, and in particular, overlaying music on top of videos.

I have to be fair. If this were a multimillion dollar outfit, his stuff would look like pure crap. It's because it's not that it looks like pure gold. Other people trying to put up videos literally do no more than turn on the video camera record a few minutes, and they're done. There's no editing or creativity. It's America's (Not So) Funniest Home Videos.

So, run your little ole browser to Dan's site and have yourself a peek.

And remember.

You heard it here first!

Because you surf the web way too much if you come to my website and Dan's at the same time.

Really.

Go away now.

Shoo!