"What it is, and how it is done."
I don't know how interesting this is going to be, but I decided to share how I nail together these LiveJournal posts. A lot of these posts are written with very little preparation. Some of them are transcribed directly from books, or other sites, which are sourced, lest anyone think me more creative or interesting than I am.
Sometimes I want to write and I don't have my laptop with me. However, I always have my notebook with me, so I make some handwritten notes and then type them up afterwards. This is what happened at the ball game. These are the original real-time notes, scanned directly from my little notebook.
As you can see, it's largely unintelligible gibberish. After some detective work, I managed to transcribe it thus:
The seats are angled expertly so that even after four separate flights of escalator, I still feel close to the action. Americans. They just don't know when to quit. It's about 50% full - an intermittent sea of red and white. The songs play over everything that happens* . Inquiries as to the existence of a directory to decipher these well-understood tunes are dismissed as silly.
Like all American sports, there's a lot of standing around and waiting for things to happen,** but the Americans don't seem to care. They buy hot dogs from men in brightly-coloured jackets walking around shouting "Hot Dogs!" in a Mexican accent. They walk around, and they sing or clap along to the oddly-pitched rock track samples.
Tonight, the Anaheim Angels are playing the Texas Rangers.
It may be a by-product of a highly
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militarised society, where the mere act of questioning the role of the military in public can get you into serious trouble (even with people who call themselves liberals), but they are very suggestible. They turn up in their thousands, dressed in their Angels uniforms, responding to any and all on-screen prompts (?suggestible? to authority), cheering at the right times, and keen to out-do each other in demonstrating arbitrary allegiance to a team they actually don't give a shit about.
There are large foam fingers, the purpose or origin of which is unclear. People react to images that flash on-screen during ?plays?. Sometimes there are clips of players making mistakes and sometimes there are just ads. There is also a live feed
///
of various parts of the crowd, people dressed exceptionally stupidly, and small children. There are regular samples of organ bits. They specifically act stupid or dance around to get on camera. Commands like "make some noise" and "get loud" appear on the screen, they obey.
The back end of the stadium is completely open. You can see the freeway all the way down the 57. It's very bright in here.
There is a Kiss-Cam.
*(although only for the home side, I later learn - the away team must muddle through without musical accompaniment)
**(and that's just the players)
This, too, is unacceptable and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the internet. I rejigged it a bit, deleted some bits, added more, inserted a photo, pasted the whole thing from Notepad into LiveJournal and posted it here.
Now you know.
Sometimes I want to write and I don't have my laptop with me. However, I always have my notebook with me, so I make some handwritten notes and then type them up afterwards. This is what happened at the ball game. These are the original real-time notes, scanned directly from my little notebook.
As you can see, it's largely unintelligible gibberish. After some detective work, I managed to transcribe it thus:
The seats are angled expertly so that even after four separate flights of escalator, I still feel close to the action. Americans. They just don't know when to quit. It's about 50% full - an intermittent sea of red and white. The songs play over everything that happens* . Inquiries as to the existence of a directory to decipher these well-understood tunes are dismissed as silly.
Like all American sports, there's a lot of standing around and waiting for things to happen,** but the Americans don't seem to care. They buy hot dogs from men in brightly-coloured jackets walking around shouting "Hot Dogs!" in a Mexican accent. They walk around, and they sing or clap along to the oddly-pitched rock track samples.
Tonight, the Anaheim Angels are playing the Texas Rangers.
It may be a by-product of a highly
///
militarised society, where the mere act of questioning the role of the military in public can get you into serious trouble (even with people who call themselves liberals), but they are very suggestible. They turn up in their thousands, dressed in their Angels uniforms, responding to any and all on-screen prompts (?suggestible? to authority), cheering at the right times, and keen to out-do each other in demonstrating arbitrary allegiance to a team they actually don't give a shit about.
There are large foam fingers, the purpose or origin of which is unclear. People react to images that flash on-screen during ?plays?. Sometimes there are clips of players making mistakes and sometimes there are just ads. There is also a live feed
///
of various parts of the crowd, people dressed exceptionally stupidly, and small children. There are regular samples of organ bits. They specifically act stupid or dance around to get on camera. Commands like "make some noise" and "get loud" appear on the screen, they obey.
The back end of the stadium is completely open. You can see the freeway all the way down the 57. It's very bright in here.
There is a Kiss-Cam.
*(although only for the home side, I later learn - the away team must muddle through without musical accompaniment)
**(and that's just the players)
This, too, is unacceptable and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the internet. I rejigged it a bit, deleted some bits, added more, inserted a photo, pasted the whole thing from Notepad into LiveJournal and posted it here.
Now you know.