Chili XXX

https://youtu.be/dFHjlWrxO6A

The preceding video is my final presentation for IST 646.  In it, I use video, narration, photos, music, sound, and LOTS of transitions.  It's been a few years since I worked on something this involved, and wish I had more footage.

What I ended up with is pretty good, but the narration ends abruptly, otherwise I think it's great.  I hope you enjoy it as well, and I think I should probably load this onto my chili blog right after finishing this post.

This process was definitely time-consuming - shooting the video took an entire evening, editing it took me days, and finishing the written aspect of our final presentation should take me at least a few more hours.  There is some footage that I wasn't able to get - anyone actually eating the chili - because my toddler missed his nap and was being, for lack of a better term, quite a handful.  I also wish I got more footage of toppings and of my wife's cooking.  But I made do with what I had, and the result really isn't worse off for it.

Lastly, I forgot to say that I add 6 cloves of garlic!  I can't believe I forgot that one!

The Future of Storytelling

How do I see my own role in the future of storytelling, digital and/or oral?

I don’t see myself as a storyteller.  I think of what I do here more as a keeper of my own personal public record or an auto-documentary of sorts.  None of my posts reflect traditional storytelling structure, many do not have any lessons or morals, but they all seem to have just one thing in common: me.  If anyone out there is interested in what I have to say, then this is the only place to go.  While there may not be a demand for that sort of thing commercially, surely friends and family can get something out of it.  This is a personal record, and will probably be a great place to get inspiration for anyone writing my obituary.

So no, I don’t see myself having much of a future as an oral storyteller.  While I read to my son every day, I certainly am not going to turn this into a career.  Digitally, the stories I will probably tell most often will be how-to videos about placing inter-library loan holds.  Five years ago, I would have said that I wanted to be a digital storyteller, but now I want to be a librarian.  Now, I see myself as more of a story keeper than a teller, and I’m just fine with that. 

I hope that I keep up with my blog posts after this class ends.  I’ve been on here almost weekly for a little over a month, and looking at my recent activity, that’s more than the last five years combined in posts.  At the same time, I can’t justify spending time on something that is viewed so infrequently when I have what can best be described as a “butt load” of homework to do before the end of May 2016.  So, like all my other projects, I will continue to chant “May 2016” when anyone asks when I will get things done.  I’m busy now?  Just find me in May 2016 to find out what busy REALLY means. 

I will post my final project on here when it’s done.  Hopefully that’s not the last this blog ever sees of me, but if it is, then I’ll say thanks for reading and have a great day!

Popping the Question

This is my midterm project for my 'Storytelling' class at SU.

This is not the story I attempted to tell.  The first attempt at this was with video, not still images, and I was using FinalCutPro to edit.  It turns out, my version of FCP cannot handle High Definition video, and my laptop cannot handle the latest version of FCP.  So after a full day's work, I had to scrap the project.  I tried editing in other programs, but nothing gave me what I needed for the price I was willing to pay (nothing).

I may end up using that footage for an extra credit assignment, as the voiceover has already been recorded and music synced.  There is a computer lab where I work that has the software and equipment I need to finish it up.  Here's hoping!

On to this assignment.  It's fairly basic, I used Audacity (which I'm really enjoying more every time I use it) for audio and WeVideo to throw it together with pictures.

The story speaks for itself, and it's two minutes long, so I'll just let you see for yourself.

Silverstein's Engine

The following is from Shel Silverstein's 'Where the Sidewalk Ends,' and was completed through an assignment for my Digital Storytelling class at Syracuse University.  

First, I chose to read from this book because I thought it would lend itself well to my assignment of a self-contained story in 60 seconds, and in reading through the entire book today, this one was perfect in length and lent itself very well to easy-to-find sound effects.  

I recorded the audio using my computer's built-in microphone, which is frowned upon professionally.  I attempted to use an external mic, but after hours of fiddling with it both on my laptop and a nearby desktop, I decided to see how awful the laptop's mic would sound.  It turns out, it sounds great!  

In the background are files from freesound.org, I knew I wanted some train sounds, but ended up book-ending some birds chirping for a nice outdoor feel.  Of course (spoiler alert!) there's a big crash sound in there too.

I used Audacity for mixing.  Initially, I tried Final Cut Pro but having not done this level of sound mixing, I decided to use the other program as there was a 30-minute tailor-made tutorial of how to do this project.  Of course, there was a lot to learn, and I'm very happy that I have a little bit of a background in video editing, and Audacity was very similar to Final Cut in many ways.  That being said, the longest part of this assignment was tweaking the audio.  

I also ended up using buzzsprout.org to upload the audio as Blogger would not allow a straight-up audio upload.  I didn't include a song, as anything I could think of was either irrelevant or distracting.  I know the assignment required it, but instead I threw in three sound effects that are under my reading for the entirety of the piece.

Was this a boring post?  Probably, unless you're my professor or a classmate, then you might find this interesting.  Everybody should give that one-minute story a listen.  Even if you don't like my voice, the Shyamalan twist at the 50-second mark is a doozy!  

Writing

I was about 7 or 8 years old when my parents brought home our first computer.  I don’t know what kind of computer it was, but I do know that it pre-dated the internet by a few years. I mostly used it to play games, and we had two games - neither of which I remember well but know that each game required multiple floppy discs.  Because we didn’t know what to do with this computer, it was housed in our basement, a scary, dimly-lit room that constantly smelled like wet farts.  While that description may seem unnecessarily crass, I mean it quite literally.  There was a sump pump issue that created excess moisture and a fully-functional toilet behind a half wall in the corner.  In a family of four, this toilet was a life-saver, but made for an otherwise unpleasant atmosphere.

On our basement computer, I somehow got it into my head that I could write a story.  I think it took me a few hours, but in the end I typed about a page of a manuscript that was about a magic sword that flew, a boy, and a castle.  I no longer have this story and am pretty sure it’s just the plot to Disney’s “The Black Cauldron” but shorter, more incomprehensible, and littered with grammatical errors.  While it’s easy to see where my inspiration came from at that age, I did not pursue typing any further until after I took a keyboarding class.  

Of course I wrote and typed in school.  I did not consider keeping a journal or a blog until after flunking out of college for the second time.  After college, I had a computer without the internet and not much to do with it.  I still read books and was very much a fan of David Sedaris and Maddox’s web site.  Trying to emulate them, I somehow landed a non-paying gig reviewing new CDs for a local music store’s website.  I started writing not as Travis Olivera, but as “The Chopper,” for reasons I no longer remember, but it is a nickname that persists 13 years later.

I started writing with my friend John Nagy (who is no longer with us), and started a blogging website called “EmployeesMustWashHands.com” (that is no longer with us).  Nagy wrote under the pseudonym “Rumpo” and together we achieved very little, save our own amusement.  Having this freedom to write helped me decide to go back to college, and to eventually study journalism to learn how to write, something that for some reason never interested me in the past.

I was a General Studies major at the local community college in Utica, Mohawk Valley Community College.  There, I started to find my voice submitting fashion reviews (from the perspective of someone who does not understand or appreciate fashion) and reporting on news written on the inside of campus bathroom walls in the student newspaper.  Eventually I took a job at that newspaper, somehow thinking that I could do a better job than the people that were running it.  I was wrong.  Even helping publish a lackluster weekly newspaper is an enormous amount of work, and left little room for writing.  Additionally, it was impossible to please everyone and was a frustrating experience overall.  

At this point, I transferred to SUNY Purchase, in White Plains, NY, and changed my major to Journalism.  There, I took a course called “Creative Non-Fiction,” which further explored my ‘blog’ writing, but didn’t really help with my journalism writing.  The assignments and due dates helped me really focus more on writing differently and using different subjects.  I was still writing opinion pieces, but no newspaper would ever publish a 10-page editorial about why Billy Joel is terrible.  

Outside of class, right before I left for Purchase, I met the girl who I would eventually marry.  Of course, she stayed in Utica while I spent that semester away.  The two of us spoke on the phone frequently but also kept a journal between the two of us - she would keep it and write in it for a week, then when we saw each other on the weekends we would hand the journal off.  It was like a dual diary, and it allowed us to really explore what was meaningful to us for an audience of one.  Purchase, for me, was one of the only times in my life where I felt true solitude.  I would go to the library there daily and check out different religious texts and philosophical works and it really helped shape the person I was to become.  All of this is documented thoroughly in that journal, along with transcriptions of conversations between pretentious art students.

My college journey led me back to Central New York, where I attended Utica College (UC).  I never considered going to there, but my wife worked in the admissions office and processed my application for free.  Since they offered me a better deal than I was getting at SUNY Purchase, I moved back home.

At UC I became completely engrossed in all things Journalism.  I worked at the student newspaper and was a staff writer, online editor, and photo editor by the time I left.  I stopped writing entertaining pieces to concentrate on news articles.  It left me unfulfilled creatively, but my output was impressive.  Weekly stories and deadlines about dull topics took the place of the multi-page essays about my experiences in a wedding band.  I eventually grew to dislike Journalism, but not before sinking my teeth into an interesting story where our newspapers were allegedly stolen by a staff member.  

After graduating, if I wanted to do anything related to Journalism, it would be to shoot and edit video, not write for a newspaper.  I did take away some important lessons from my time as a journalism student, which are:

• Read what you write out loud before submitting
• Don’t rely on other people to do your work for you
• If you HAVE to rely on someone, annoy them until you get what you need

Between my fulfilling relationship with my wife and working a few jobs, I was too burned out to keep up a blog, and I wrote very little here after 2011.  A few months ago when Rumpo passed away, I decided the best way for me to honor and remember him would be to write it down in the blog that he is partially responsible for.  Now, it seems I’m writing in here again not to fulfill any spiritual need, but because of assignments.  While that may be a partial drag, if I didn’t tell you that, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference.  

After this six-week course, who knows, maybe I’ll go back and finish my book about the boy and the magic sword.  

Chili, a Podcast

I had to try my hand at podcasting.  Using a story from my other blog, "Chili, a Life," (http://chilialife.blogspot.com/), I attempted voiceover despite losing my voice almost completely two nights ago at a TV on the Radio/Pixies concert in Cooperstown, NY.

The chili blog is a project that I all but abandoned years ago, but there are still recent handwritten notes about my process.  Will I ever update it again?  Only time will tell.  To hear more about it, click on this podcast:

http://travis-l-olivera.podomatic.com/entry/2015-05-24T07_25_37-07_00

As an afterward, consider reading my other blog posts about chili.  Since I never update I'll just say that I'm approaching Chili XXX (30), and I have entered and lost two chili cook offs.  

Thanks for reading, and a special thank you to those of you who are not reading this as a required part of our discussion grade!

Steve Jobs as a Storyteller

https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc

In Part 1 of this module, you viewed a video of the late Steve Jobs telling three personal stories at a commencement in 2005. Please use your blog to discuss what makes his stories memorable. What makes them powerful? You may find reading the transcript of his speech to be useful in thinking about these questions. When you have completed your blog posting, please provide the link to us and the topic selected within this thread.

Steve Jobs is undeniably a great public speaker and storyteller.  His stories are relatable to everyone, and it’s always impressive to hear someone who is that far removed from everyday blue collar workers telling stories about his life that people can understand.  What these three examples of Jobs’ storytelling powerful, I think, is that they are essentially subtle Buddhist tracts.

His first story is about loss and finding one’s true identity.  That loss is his college career, and he uses that loss to grow and become the man who will found Apple shortly thereafter.  His second story also deals with loss, which he mentions in the story’s preface.  Again, he uses this failure to drive him to become a better person.  His third story is about death, or at least the prospect of it.  He eventually weaves his cancer diagnosis into a tale about following your dreams.  

On paper, the topics of these stories don’t relate very well to their lessons, but Jobs effortlessly creates threads between them in a way that you wouldn’t expect.  I mentioned Buddhism above, as Jobs is a noted Buddhist, he follows the idea that pain and suffering are unavoidable aspects of life - through this pain and suffering people can experience true growth.  This is basically the thesis of his speech.  

Content aside, he is pleasant to listen to.  I doubt many Fortune-500 Presidents or Commencement Addresses are as timeless and interesting as this one.  That’s really what makes this special.  Despite being a mogul in the technology industry, he makes sure that this advice will still work 100 years in the future.  Unlike his products that need to be upgraded almost annually, this speech will stand the test of time.  I think that really illustrates the importance of storytelling - my iPod won’t be around by the time I graduate, but this speech will resonate with me forever.  True connections are made through human interaction, not USB cables.

Disclaimer

Dear three old blog readers and classmates,

I am enrolled in a program through Syracuse University to get my Master’s degree in Library and Information Sciences.  As part of one of my classes I am required to blog.  Because I am lazy, I’ll just use blogger here to fulfill this requirement.  This means regular readers will be subjected to my thoughts on a number of specific subjects, and new readers will be tempted to read my thoughts on a number of issues that happened years ago.  I don’t know which is worse, but I’ll let time decide.  Who knows, maybe some of these old blog posts will be helpful in my course on storytelling!  

Sincerely,

Blogger ID 8364064622254861907

John "Rumpo" Nagy, 1982-2015

John Nagy was a classmate of mine at Waterville Central School from Kindergarten to 12th grade, and one of those guys who was genuinely liked by everyone.  He grew up to be a tall, confident, handsome paramedic/firefighter, but in the mid ‘90s, he was short, scrawny and bespectacled.  Back then he was the epitome of a nerd, but had this quirky, disarming sense of humor that would make him an impossible target of bullying.  Most Watervillians our age remember him as the kid who wrote and illustrated “Java Duck,” a bizarre semi-daily comic strip starring, if memory serves correct, a duck who drank coffee.  To an outsider, this may sound strange but it was a BIG DEAL in middle school.  I didn't get to know him well until we both rode the bench on the modified soccer team.  Neither of us were particularly skilled at - or cared about - soccer, but we left that bench warmer after every game. He was the main source of comic relief during those cold Fall days, and inside jokes like “Noah’s Ark wood” and “cleats angry!” always elicited a colorful response from our coach.

After high school, I flunked out of two colleges and wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life.  Antidepressants weren’t working, I lacked interest in just about everything, and I lost contact with all my college friends.  During this time I found myself frequenting the Waterville Area Volunteer Ambulance Corps (WAVAC) bay, because they had a good group of people hanging out there, and because they had a big TV.  Nagy was a constant presence there and he, along with other friends, attempted to get me to become a member of WAVAC and signed me up for an EMT class.  Being an EMT wasn’t really for me though, and I was pretty relieved when I failed the written exam.  

I didn’t really notice, but at some point he became one of my closest friends.  For guys, that usually means watching and making fun of a shitty movie and eating equally shitty microwave pizza.  I remember multiple occasions when I would get out of work, stop at his apartment on the way home, watch Sealab, go home, then he would come over like an hour later.  It wasn’t every day, but the time added up.  We played Grand Theft Auto, ate beef jerky, and recommended books to each other.  For a while, that’s just how things went.  

I started writing around this time too.  I was heavily influenced by David Sedaris and Maddox, which inspired me to write partially witty and unnecessarily misogynistic CD reviews.  I actually landed a gig writing weekly reviews for a local music store’s e-newsletter, where I was paid $15/week in used CD credit.  Nagy liked my writing, and in our spare time the two of us created a website.  We named the site after our shared love of petty larceny, specifically taking place in restaurant bathrooms.  “EmployeesMustWashHands.com” was where we both posted rants and reflections as “The Chopper” (me) and “Rumpo” (Nagy).  I did most of the writing, but he was the kind of guy that somehow knew how computers and web design worked.  That was handy.  We sold some t-shirts, went on photo assignments, reviewed movies, and enjoyed spending time on it.  We were our own biggest fans.  While we pushed each other to improve and write more often, we couldn’t justify spending any money on the domain name after about a year if the audience consisted of the two of us.  He is one of the only people I can credit with getting me back on my feet, which led me to a degree in journalism years later.

Somehow, we, along with Jarod Petrie (another Waterville classmate, soccer bench warmer, EMT, and friend) got the opportunity to move into a house together.  It literally brought us closer together and figuratively drove us apart.  Living with someone can be difficult - dishes are left dirty for weeks, someone uses up all the shampoo, your leftovers disappear - that kind of spiteful pettiness can strain even the best relationships.  Often, Nagy would prank me and/or Petrie by doing things like leaving thumb tacks in my bed or writing racial slurs on the soap dispenser.  It was memorable but less than endearing.  This living situation lasted maybe a year, and by the time the we moved out I think we all needed a break from each other.  Shortly thereafter, I had also begun smoking weed and my priorities for friends shifted from “friends” to “friends that had weed.”  Since Petrie and Nagy didn’t fit into the latter friend category, it was even less likely that we would hang out.  

I saw Nagy a few years ago at Hannaford in New Hartford, I introduced him to my wife and we said we should meet up sometime.  I think we talked about chili.  We didn’t meet up - that was the last we saw each other. I’ve noticed that when you start smoking weed you leave your old friends, and when you stop smoking weed you leave the new ones.  So do ever you call up your old crew to hang out and ask, “I’m done with weed now, guys - wanna catch a flick this weekend?”  No.  Instead you just have awkward, random interactions at the grocery store years later and feign interest in getting back in touch.

I try not to have regrets in life, because there’s nothing that I can do about them.  I rationalize anything potentially regrettable as a necessary stumbling block to becoming the person I am today.  That being said, I wish that we spent more time together.  But I guess wishing you had more time with a friend is a pretty good way to leave things.  

Rumpo was one of a kind.  Without him I wouldn’t be where I am today.  He knew how to make the best of a bad situation.  He stuck by me when I was at my worst and pushed me to be a better person - I imagine that’s what made him a great paramedic.  He sort of turned "sticking by people when they were at their worst" into a career.  And I, along with all those people he helped professionally, are much better off for having known him.