I Love Technology part 1

Sometimes I am utterly blown away by where technology is taking us. I love where the world is going.
In the last couple of days I have come across some amazing shit.

Games

Firstly there is EVE online, a Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), where I spent sunday morning talking and flying with a good friend of mine in Joburg through the depths of space.

I'm the little ship on the right

We met up at a space station and made our way to a deadspace encounter with some baddies where we shot the shit out of them in a spectacular 3D BSG kinda graphics way - all the time talking to one another on skype.
Now some of you may nod your heads and go, "Yeah EVE rocks!!", while others may shake your heads and go, "Geez, Joe, we thought you were so cool. How wrong we were". But pay attention to what I'm talking about - I'm talking about technology.
When I was kid (way, way back in a galaxy far far away, endearingly referred to as The Eighties) we couldn't even have dreamed up the stuff that most of us take for granted today. Let me re-iterate - I was talking to my friend, through my computer, while playing a fully-immersive science-fiction space game with unbelievable Hollywood-type graphics. Are you getting this? Huge block-buster movies 20 years ago did not have these kinds of special effects. Seriously, go dig up your original Betamax video of Star Wars - it's brilliant, but the SFX on EVE are better. And you control them! It's your ship!
I can hang out with my friend in another city, or continent for that matter, and we can play online together while talking to one another. This is unreal, man, it is totally fucking incredible.

Blogs
But wait, it get's better.
Check the blog links I have down the right side of this page. You see any names you recognise? Thomas Dolby, Madam & Eve, John Connolly, Neil Gaiman? These are like famous people, right? I mean, I own Dolby CD's. I've bought Gaiman's books and own all the original Sandman comics - but technology, and more importantly the Internet, has allowed me access to their thoughts and ramblings. Or more to the point, it has allowed them to interact with their fans and allow them a behind-the-scenes view of the creation process of their latest album or book while still maintaining a level of anonymity and privacy.
In the old days if you wanted to communicate with the writers, singers or actors you admired you'd have to hunt down their "Fanclub" address and then send them boring old letters and wait months and months and years and years for a response - if you ever got one.
I remember sending Stephen King a fan-letter when I was about 15 or 16 and waiting for 3 months before the damn letter came back to me with a stamp across saying "Return to sender - Postage insufficient"!!! (So because I hadn't put enough stamps on the letter to cover the journey from Joburg to Maine the post office posted it back to me - costing them twice as much as it would have if they had just delivered the damn letter in the first place. Come to think of it I probably did have enough postage but it took so damn long to reach the States that the currency had changed making my postage insufficient! - Rant over)
By contrast, today I can log onto the Stephen King Forum, ask a question of the man himself and NEVER get a response. Okay, bad example.
But Gaiman has his agent's address and phone number on his site, Pratchett used to have a publicly accessible email address and Alastair Reynolds can be reached through his blog. This is incredible.

Music
Most recently I was on Thomas Dolby's blog and discovered that he is recording a new album. He did a small tour last year and has, thankfully, been bitten by the music bug again, (this is a man who has released 4 albums in the last 27 years!) So it is with great excitement that fans of Thomas Dolby will welcome this news.
On his blog he has been documenting the writing and recording process through which I heard about eSessions.com. eSessions is basically an online recording studio and session muso database. Most solo artists don't have bands and so what they do is write and demo their songs alone and then when it comes time to record the album versions they book a studio and hire sessions musos to play the instruments.
Traditionally this is a time consuming process as not all the session musos you want are always available at the same time, so unless you have access to your own studio you will end up paying multiple studio fees to go in and record multiple sessions. For example, let's say I've written a song, but now I need some piano laid down, a drum track, guitars and maybe some horns. But I can only get hold of the drummer in two weeks time, whereas the pianist and guitarist are only available this week. So I have to hire the studio twice, once this week to record piano and guitars and then again in two weeks to record the drummer. It's a long and expensive process.
Enter eSessions. Most of the session musos available on eSessions have their own home-studios. So you enter a search string for drummers and find out who is available and book them. You pay the session fee, they record the part in their own studio and upload the full-res file to the server. So what's so amazing about this? I mean the technology is great, but what really blew me away is exactly who is on that database.
I won't bore you with names you won't recognise but here are some of the artists available to record on your next album, (for a fee of course), the life-long bassist for Peter Gabriel, the saxophonist for Tom Waits, the drummer for Portishead, the keyboard player for Goldfrapp. This is utterly mind-blowing.
Tony Levin is available for a session??? On my song??? Holy shit!!!

And speaking of accessible musos, following on the success of their last experiment, Radiohead have once again released the "stems" of another of their songs, Reckoner. Basically, they've split the parts of the song and separated them into "stems". You get a vocal stem, (which will only have Thom Yorke's vocals on it) and a Bass stem, and a Guitar stem, and so on and so forth. These stems are available through iTunes and 7Digital and you can download the individual tracks of their song and then remix it in anyway you want. And when you're done you can upload it to www.radioheadremix.com where your friends and others can vote for their favourite remix. Imagine, a Joe Vaz remix of a Radiohead song. This is extraordinary. This is what technology is about - allowing you to jam, interact and communicate with your favourite artists, actors, musicians and writers. Never before in history has this been possible.
And all thanks to the internet.
Are you beginning to understand my excitment yet?
There's more.

to be continued...