Neal Cormier

Automated Altruism

Posted on January 18, 2012 by NealCormier

Consider that when you ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ someone, at least on platforms where people take their blogging seriously, you are telling them that they are effective enough for you to go in, if even for a skim, and actually thought their content of value. In turn, by modular inevitability, they will most often like or follow (share) one of your posts.

But here’s the gag: Every Like is free advertising for people who (such as on WordPress) appear with other blogs of theirs in a sample blog, right into your email. Or what happens is that the other person goes and looks at your stuff even if it is not automated like this. But the WP style email ‘Follower’ model is probably the winning stroke for now in that it is direct advertising. I wonder still when social networks start developing into enough modular societies to be able to start closing themselves off to evolve into self-sustaining micro-states. Anyway this is going to magnetize, polarize and pocket the world by means of interest and merit rather than nepotism, or ‘who you know.’

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I never thought I’d be the one to say this was a good thing, that the web is in some ways actually inherently altruist in structure. (I say this, being sort of an x-objectivist.)

But I must say, the power of the reciprocal is brought with an innate and new level of pervasiveness. The Facebook ‘Like,’ the Google +1, the Stumble Upon…These are all very powerful. In the absolute very beginning of SEO for me (2005) I thought the social array of buttons were rather superfluous.

Get this: they are still the same tools, it’s just that people are taking the web more seriously, which is what I’ve been crying for, needs to happen for some time. That said, I would like to share with you what I’m discovering about the ‘Like’ paradigm to web computing in terms of ‘social’ network building. It’s happening in LinkedIn and WordPress for me now. Two rules:

1. Whatever you do for someone else, will probably be returned to you.

2. This is actually what is probably a ‘web-vortex’ Yeah, I just made up that word, and yes, I just make up words. Why? Because before the linguistic PC Nazis hijacked English, people actually put thoughts together with something called logic. Well, the ‘Like’ across all platforms is actually what I believe to be the structural implosional process of human interest into eventual or sudden pocket groups of which some might even manifest themselves geographically. That said, the Like is what you think might be a nice way to share that you liked something of interest to you and possibly be of objective or social value as well. In reality its a magnet to flatten society just as transactions are flattened in a bank account if both the bank and the consumer-Point of Sale happen in the same instant or thereabouts. Well, in the same way, what’s going to happen when you have social media tech that is so powerful that since Google has inventoried every entity on the planet, one Like could mean 15 sales. It will get to the point where everyone with talent fits in, and everyone without self-starting innate drive coupled with talent, real talent, will be on the OUTs.

This is the end of social marketing, and it is also the end of marketing.

***

Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.

– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.

He is also an up and coming fiction writer, of which Vesper Heliotropic is his first full length novel publication with Amazon, Barnes and Nobles (eBooks) and Lulu Inc. (for paperback & hardcover) Neal recently had a showing at National Airport in Arlington, VA (March 11 – June 25 in Terminal A). He also, and even more recently, had a first book signing for Vesper Heliotropic at The Midtown Scholar, a local hipster style bookstore in downtown Harrisburg, PA.

Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.

After high school, Neal attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and spent four years living in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. He moved to France after this, and spent roughly about the same length of time in the region of Basse-Normandie, northern France. As a result, he speaks French and has a (tall) 9 year old daughter, Lili. He now resides back home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with his fiancé, Kristin.

List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier

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– Vesper Heliotropic is a general teen/adult sci-fi ebook, paperback and hardcover, and is a Steampunk(ish) serial novel. The first written publication is OUT NOW VIA LULU.com on PAPERBACK and SPECIAL-JACKETED HARDCOVER, and is available for THE AMAZON KINDLE as well as BARNES AND NOBLES NOOK EBOOKS. VESPER HELIOTROPIC, THE CRYSTAL TURBINES SERIES GRAPHIC NOVEL IS ALSO OUT NOW ON FULL COLOR GLOSSY PAPERBACK! 46 Pages Full Color Interior and Exterior – ONLY $19.99! –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdtY0LxBCsg

Vesper Heliotropic Book I. CRYSTAL TURBINES by Neal Aaron Cormier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Vesper Heliotropic Book I. CRYSTAL TURBINES © Copyright 2011 Neal Cormier All Rights Reserved
Visit the Author’s Website – Neal Cormier Art

The end is not as far as the Stars. You are the first one of your kind. – The Apple IIc.

Posted on January 17, 2012 by NealCormier

Apple IIc

“Keep your electric eye on me babe, put your space face close to mine, babe…”

-David Bowie, Moonage Daydream

The little beige box that looked to be peering over at us, was I believe purchased by my father in 1987. I bought my iMac in 1998. A $1,326 wad of cash I’d saved from what was actually the tip of the iceberg from a total of around $6,500 or so, I’d still had left from my first serving job. It took me roughly two months to save that. 17 hour days. Yikes. Then my mom died the same summer.

My Dad, a professional ‘Word Processor’ working in the cocaine addled 1980’s government contract office environment of Crystal City, Virginia. I think the software had cost more than the machine. The ‘Word Processing Software,’ along with BASIC I think was around $5,500 at the time and I think he got the computer with it.

It came with a keyboard with integrated floppy (5”x8”) drive. I loved that computer. Remember the ads for it: The apple would be sitting by a stream, by your office seat, near you in the bathroom…The Apple was with you. That was the message. Jobs was WAY ahead of his time in this way.

“…John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator, would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice. …”

-Terminator 2 – Judgement Day

– Scrub to a little but passed the middle of the video to see Sarah Conner’s quote. –

This notion, that the computer was your pal, your assistant, the replacement perhaps to the secretary. Ha, Apple made the secretary so obsolete that we just kept her anyway, cause she looks pretty. Obsolete media, including secretaries, become art form. Wonder how many more pretty women got hired as secretaries or managerial assistants as the result of the influx of the desktop to the office…(?) The office must have gotten a lot more decorative. Thus, the computer produces multiplicity!

It would always be there, from there on. The computer, would be…Yes. Watching. What we didn’t realize all along, we were not so much giving it commands as it was watching us…learning. In a way, this is true, the computer has in a sense gotten to know us and in turn, completely transformed our environments, and hence, our lives.

(In the sixth grade I wrote an essay titled, TV is Watching TV. My Dad helped me with it. But as a result of it, and my art talent, they flung me from LD to to GT and threw away the key for good.)

My Dad’s Apple IIc which resided in our immitation wood living room, that for some reason happened to be rather Earthy, would be rested in the corner opposite from the couch and to the right of the TV. On a brand new actual wood and metal desk, which I thought of implicitly as modern. No compartments. No slots, nowhere to put anything. Except the disk drive. This was the new paradigm, and none of us knew it. Yet.

The monitor was smaller than you might expect, and the keyboard rested on a different level of the double platformed desk. No mouse. Not yet. I think I didn’t even experience a mouse in the home until the iMac.

To be continued in my ongoing book memoir ‘My Struggle’ out next summer!

BTW: Deleted scenes from the original Terminator!

***

Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.

– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.

Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.

List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier

Art & Blog

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The Novel’s Website

Vesper Heliotropic Book I. Crystal Turbines out now on Nook and Kindle, Paperback and Hardcover via Lulu.com

The bright room.

Posted on January 15, 2012 by NealCormier

I think my mom really shaped my life.

Yeah, I guess I’ll start there.

Going through my entire life starting there.

I was 4.

Standing in a bright room, contemplating something I think. The sun was coming in, nearly blinding me. I just stood there anyway, let the piercingly uncomfortable light pour warm glow over rosy nose and cheeks. Rosy cheeks and sickel’s compass come, maybe…

Intensity never bothered me like it did other people I guess.

I was like that, but kind of a dumb seeming kid, unintuitive.

I could walk into a wall.

Or at least so extremely gullible you could lead me down any hallway or alley or play any dirty trick, I fell for everything. They called me ‘Neal-Peel-Wheel’ at school. Elementary school. Reminds me of when my brother was kidnapped.

He called me ‘Neal-Peel-Wheel,’ too.

He was also, two years old at the time, and just followed these bullies -Jamie Lance- (his real name). I forget the other fucker’s name.

I knew him from Ravensorth Elementary school that led my 2 year old brother from our driveway mind you, on his bigwheel 3 or so miles, all the way to Lake Acatink park.

Left him in the woods. Nice guys.

I wish I could have eaten their brains and drowned them in their own blood. Yeah. Bitter? Hmm…Wise men say that ‘when you hold a grudge, you are letting someone take up residence in your mind, rent free.’ That is true sometimes. I could see it that way. Most of the time. Maybe. It is true in many cases. So is the reverse. More on that later.

I think they hadn’t even touched him. The bullies. Jamie and what’s his fuck.

That’s the gullibility I’m talking about though. We both had it, that innocence maybe. There are people I know who wouldn’t have fallen for that, even at two years of age. Lili, my daughter is one of them I think, little smarter than we were at that age.

The room, though: When I was 4. – It was those patchy shallow old carpets that resembled vomit. Why the hell did they make green carpets anyway? Seventies. Uck. The point of the bright room is that I also spent time there staring into space, thinking, and I even remember what I was thinking at that moment, too…

It was that ‘I am 4.’

“I am 4,” I told myself.

I knew it on that level of self-concsciousness. Wish I’d known at that time what a gift that really was. At least my parents were intellectual enough to nurture it to an extent that on one hand, didn’t exceed their culture, on the other, was 43,000% better than any other parents I would ever come to know with few exceptions.

That said, Joseph Campbell, Ayn Rand, Marshall McLuhan, Ben H. Bagdickian, and others as well as ‘the group’ of my 4 closest friends whom I will introduce later, would become my second family. I took all of them to heart.

“I am 4.”

“What does that mean?”

This is the kind of self-reflective abstract thought that would come to characterize one of the vital differences of me with just about everyone else I would meet from there on out. I’m 34 now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back and tell myself that. School myself. That would be nice. Hell, prolly wouldn’t believe myself, although I would certainly have been intrigued.

Anyway, I had good parents. Great parents. My Dad, my mom, both intellectual, artist types I guess you could say. Yet, hippie gone yuppie in a way. Fuckin eh, they had kids, they did their best.

Both were at Woodstock, both got high there I think. More my Dad. That’s a stupid thing to say though…

…I guess I say that cause I heard other parents who ‘were there’ that say they didn’t. Yeh right. Suburban people are strange. Very. I would learn this, a large life-theme I’d say.

Suburbia.

If I wasn’t the boy who fell to Earth, my awkwardness and innate utter lack of social ability at the time, knowing people, other people, would make me such. I looked retarded in my Ravensworth Elementary yearbook photo. God. Nearly cross eyed.

Girls never looked at me then. I looked at them though. Always.

In Elementary school. I had gone to Brenmar before Ravensworth, as we lived in Centreville apartments, and then, proceeding this, Edsal Road VA, and then Ravensworth and Springfield VA.

Stay Tuned Tomorrow for ‘Elementary School’ 😉

***

Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.

– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.

Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.

List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier

Art & Blog

Web Design/Development Services

The Novel’s Website

SEO will ultimately end marketing.

Posted on January 12, 2012 by NealCormier

SPRINGFIELD MALL, Springfield, Virginia (Literally Half Abandoned)

For now, we think of search engine optimization as the science of bringing quality content to users by means of greater and greater improved search engine ‘visibility,’ and website architectural as well as keyword niche efficiency. But, what is the metaphysical (philosophy) sense of this? That is, the logical end of SEO?

I remember seeing Chat Roullette and saying in a flash over to my fiancé, Kristin, “This will be the beginning of the end of marketing.”

Well, CR is not yet that, though I will say its interface is just beginning to catch up to WordPress or Blogging/CMS standards. I.e. They have tagging and titles along with what appears to be a generic, but better UI.

http://chatroulette.com/

Despite this, the so-called Social Media sites are taking marketing to ‘another level.’ Everyone seems so hyped up to say that, but curiously don’t seem to care why.

Well, why is it that social media sites are taking the Web, blogging, and marketing to new stage in developing the arts themselves…?

Answer: Because the end result of technology is always automation and the end result of all social models is conformity to a set of standards which through life can pass.

Yes, philosophy does matter to the Web. Standards through which life pass are essentially ethics but express themselves in terms of culture. Cultures tend very highly to orient themselves into groups. But groups organized by what?

During the Middle Ages in Europe, the stirrup (as Marshall McLuhan points out in The Global Village) ended the reign of the sword, putting to rest the knight’s existence as a more help-dependant or Squire dependent military unit. This along with Japanese firework powder made military orientation lead to the advent of the gun and of course, the end of the sword, along with it, hand to hand combat as primary infantry method on planet Earth.

In the same way, SEO will put an end not to traditional marketing, but marketing itself essentially because it flattens transactions and closes the gap between user or buyer and proprietor in a new way.

Automation – Remember HTML? What was its primary function? To display web pages in a page-like layout. What is HTML5’s primary philosophical (meaning web) premise? Answer: To optimize and streamline for video and social media. HTML along with every other technology has become a semantic tool, meaning living in a moving fashion. Remember having to learn a backend language for real? Now it’s WordPress and Drupal. Not to say coding isn’t where the tech and money is at, but it won’t be for much longer. RSS, CMS, Blogging, and Keyword Orientation has transformed all of our processes. As the web closes the gap on users and business owners, the need to look hard to sell becomes obsolete.

Semantic Web & Infancy of Social Right Brain Dominance – Keyword Niches and Intelligent browsers and browsing is where the curve is. Recombining elements is the essence of creativity and that is also the essence of SEO, bridging the gap between producer and user by means of the progressively precise fine tuning of his or her interests. Notice I said progressively. What SEO looks like now and what it will look like 5 years from now are six different things. It will be pretty common in 2017 to have people refer to hear people refer to what scent or fragrance would go well with their blog. It will also be common to see image and speech intelligence as premium. Text will be subordinate more and more as people can speak their searches along with hearing them being echoed back in terms of Minority Report or Vesper HelioTropic style 3D arrays hooked up to your Kinect. Yeah.

Year by year more and more are connected. This is the phrase of an outdated, confused old era. The new slogan will read “Year by year, more are integrated.” Or should read. The computer has always been the great integrator and SEO is the new manifestation or infant which later will probably be automated. SEO will become a simple yet long list of preferences through which Google’s dynamic semantic-AI run database processing system will coordinate all the possibilities of where your ad could appear in terms of FAR more info than we’d consider now. Imagine doing a search for your name and seeing an ad for a colonge you mentioned over mobile text and mobile text alone? Imagine when SEO extends into what you say and maybe we’ll be watching our mouths more. See SOPA: http://www.webpagefx.com/blog/general/internet-blacklist-legislation-a-threat-to-the-economy-and-our-liberty/

Web Semantics Trumps Social Media – Right now words are the new ‘units’ of consumption. But in 2017, these will be smells, tastes, pics from your retinal cam (yep!), and Google Goggles intelligence. Semantics is refering to words that are basically just acting as tags to combine into unique niches. Think marketing was spread out enough already. The modern consumer of 2017 will have a lot more and a lot less to think about. She or he will be worried about how to make their unique impression and unique skills in order to produce enough revenue to quit their necessarily low paying day jobs. Cause all 9-5’s will be evaporating into personal collectives of ‘Followers.’

Followers Yield Special Interest Groups. The modern person in 2017 will be trying to create and fit in at the same time. No longer the two dimensional life of consumers and producers. Now everyone is both. The modern guy or gal will be hooked up with a person far better than either of them would dare to dream possible through roulette-like SEO site integrations and before college we will likely have a far better idea of what we want to do in life. Not like college will have half the draw it does now once personal ‘imprints’ generate revenue for a good number of people. The long and the short of this is that we will be buying each other’s products more and more as we buy pretty much only our staples, food, bedding, housing etc. Through online, yes, but more traditional outlets.

The man and woman’s social reality in 2025 will be the beginnings of true tribalism in America and the western world.

We will wonder why we continued to limit our buying patterns to a few names we trusted? When our apartments are furnished by our ‘local-network’ ‘Meubles Afficionado.’ Imagine living in a town geographically settling out of an online network. Imagine getting your groceries delivered to you by an artist who is living off the revenue of web performances and the local cafe has crushed its local Starbucks where each Facebook like means another $5 or $10 in the bank. Where the work of a commute is gone and you are now a pedestrian. Where the bicycle is now more used than the automobile. Where you have a 30 hour work week with a bit of homework.

Where you and your audience are not merely one, but symbiotic to each other in a feedback loop where money is taken for granted, something software takes care of generating while living and publicizing our lives is now the same thing.

***

Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.

– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.

Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.

List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier

Art & Blog

Web Design/Development Services

The Novel’s Website

www.VesperHelioTropic.com
Vesper Heliotropic Book I. CRYSTAL TURBINES by Neal Aaron Cormier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Vesper Heliotropic Book I. CRYSTAL TURBINES © Copyright 2011 Neal Cormier All Rights Reserved
Visit the Author’s Website – Neal Cormier Art

Latent Inhibition Log: 1 Observations

Posted on January 11, 2012 by NealCormier

Latent Inhibition: Random Person on bus to Olive Garden

“People walk around with their eyes closed.”

-George Clooney’s character in Men that Stare at Goats.

People are ruled by latent inhibition.

Look at this guy, this panorama. I took this picture.

He didn’t move his head once I think with any real interest in anything outside his ‘tunnel.’ Swear to god, and I look around the bus, and nothing but zombies. Nothing new of course, on my way to the restaurant I worked at. Olive Garden. Hah.

LI along with certain other social-metaphysical concepts is ‘The Program’ in my Novel, VESPER HELIOTROPIC BOOK I. CRYSTAL TURBINES that not only refers to, but heavily involves Latent Inhibition as a pervasive reality in how it affects us and even more, transforms us.

There are, in my observations many people that look around. Try and pick out patterns in their ‘stares’ though for signs of intellectual brain activity which involves Abstraction and a process of elimination, the act of making a mental model or hypothetical model in which a process of building or eliminating occurs. A solution to a problem or a generation of new ideas out of a control set, I would say is a good synopsis of that.

***

Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.

– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.

Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.

List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier

Art & Blog

Web Design/Development Services

The Novel’s Website