Another special workshop with a group of lovely people in Devon. Crafting their stories needed sensitivity and care. They were taking on new skills to tell stories about people they had cared for. Most of them recounted events from the lives of close family members who had left a deep imprint on their memories. As a carer myself, whose son moved into independent living over ten years ago, I know something of what it’s like when the day to day responsibility for them falls away, but I would never had attempted to say I understood what these people were experiencing. They gave me an insight through the digital stories they told. In those few days as we worked together I feel that some of their strength and resolve rubbed off on me. I wonder if all the stuff I told them about storytelling and using iMovie was anywhere as near as inspiring for them. Thankfully those tools allowed them to tell their story with their own words and pictures, so when the stories have been post produced and uploaded you’ll be able to see them too.

I am hoping to go back to Exeter later in the year to run a second workshop in the Past Caring series for Folk.Us.

I’ve spent the last two days upgrading my MacBooks to Snow Leopard and iLife ’11. It’s the only logical step but it’s one I have been reluctant to take. I’ve been running digital storytelling workshops using iMovie HD since 2005 and it has always served my participants well until Apple stopped shipping computers with iMovie HD installed. I knew I would have to change at some point and if you read some of my previous blog posts you will know that I considered upgrading several times. The release of iLife ’11 with iMovie ’11 (or 9) I tried again to press the software into service for creating digital stories. This time it was a success.

All my MacBooks were running OSX Leopard 10.5.8 but iLife ’11 needs OSX Snow Leopard 10.6, which won’t run iMovieHD. So as I upgraded them I left the old ways behind. At the same time I have rewritten the tutor training manual I give to workshop participants (it takes a long time to upgrade 6 MacBooks – almost 2 days).

The rewrite meant building a couple of digital stories from scratch and grabbing screen shots to illustrate each step of the process. As I did it I realised how much simpler some things are in iMovie ’11. Cropping, Ken Burns Effect, Precision Editing, Transitions are all simpler to create. It’s also easier to make adjustments later in the process, no matter how many effects have been applied. Replacing one image with another is very simple. Lengthening a zoom is simple, even with transitions in place. You can listen to the sound track whilst editing clips too. Many of the limitations I’d just grown used to in the old version of iMovie have been swept away.

The real test will come next week when I deliver my first training trainers workshop since the upgrade. What will my participants think? With nothing to compare the experience with I assume they’ll be as happy as all the others – so long as my workflow makes sense and they all go away with their stories burned to DVD.

Culture Shock have been nominated along with their partners, John Lewis in Newcastle. This is what the judges said:

Who better to tell the story of life in the North East of England, in all its different shapes, colours and sizes than the people who actually live there? TWAM have taken this simple but powerful realisation very seriously. With the invaluable support and participation of John Lewis, Newcastle, TWAM’s Culture Shock project is directly engaging its local communities and non-traditional museum visitors to create their own digital stories inspired by museum collections. As an existing TWAM business member, Culture Shock was an opportunity for John Lewis, Newcastle to develop its partnership with TWAM further and to demonstrate its commitment to its employees and the wider community.

The impact

As both audience and producers of these ‘short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart’, communities in the North East have not only been given a voice through TWAM and John Lewis, Newcastle’s partnership but have also learned new skills. 1000 digital stories will eventually form a permanent and unmatched record of life in the North East. Employees and retired employees of John Lewis, Newcastle were invited to create their own personal stories This richly varied group of participants formed an ideal pilot for the Culture Shock team who then went on to roll the project out across the region. Denise Nunn, Community Liason at John Lewis, Newcastle commented that ‘The employee enjoyment and pride is a tangible feel good factor which can only be good for business.’

The best thing you can do now is to vote for them so that they win the prize.

I had hoped to make new friends and contacts during my trip to Singapore, but I have returned home more deeply enriched that I had expected by the people I met there. I find it difficult to remember all those who come up to me after addressing a large audience, but the overall impression from them is that they really appreciated what I had to say. They also responded in later plenary sessions with some valuable questions.

Those that I met again (or for the first time) in the Boot Camp (workshop) for trainers are much easier to recall. After a few days of working together on a series of digital stories I feel I know them quite well. In the storycircle process and by looking through their personal collections of pictures I am honoured to be trusted with many secrets. Secrets, I must emphasise, that will be kept within the circle of participants in the workshop. The only parts that are made public are the digital stories that will be published. The participants came from India and the Philippines as well as Singapore so I was exposed to a range of cultures as we talked story arcs, timelines and the shortcomings of Windows Movie Maker. I received some first hand advice about eating Asian style. On eating noodles with chop sticks  - just push them into your mouth and suck. That’s the sort of advice you need when you’re in a new culture. Thanks Shalyn. (+ thanks for the Bakkwa EzPack and the Fancy Gems)

I enjoyed my time there so much I am sure I will return. I met two very special people in Singapore. Angeline and Aurelia have set up their own digital storytelling business so we had plenty in common but we also share a common faith. I soon realised that these new “contacts” had become real friends too. Angeline and I talked at length about digital storytelling and I hope I helped her think through some of the opportunities that lay ahead of them. I was really impressed with the way she made the most of contacts and grasped new opportunities. I was learning from Angeline at many points. I really valued her input into the workshop too. You should look at their website Digital Storytelling Asia

There has also been a healthy exchange of emails between the workshop “graduates” in a way that I have not known in previous workshops. From “Why isn’t my story on my memory stick?” to the more challenging “I’m not convinced of their appeal to the general audience – and certainly not of their staying power – as compared to a traditional story”.

I would answer the second question by pointing to the question Greg Dyke put to me when I was running the BBC Telling Lives project.

“I watch hundreds of hours of television in the course of my job and most of it is soon forgotten so tell me Barrie, why can I still remember the first digital story I ever watched?”

It was also good to meet up with Helen Simondson again from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne and Tom Banaszewski who is an American teaching in Shanghai. More about them in a later posting.

I was invited to deliver the keynote address to the 2nd Asian Digital Storytelling Congress in Singapore on Sept 4th 2010. It was organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore.

This is the text of my presentation which starts with the brief to which I was speaking. A pdf of this text along with the slides of my presentation can be downloaded here.

In the complex world of technology, social networking and mass media, effective communication is still best served by a simple story. Its power, to bring others into our experience and to transport us into theirs, drives us on to discover new ways of telling them. So as digital storytelling leaves infancy and those of us who nurtured it look to the future, what’s its potential and where will it take us?  After a decade of practical workshops, Barrie Stephenson looks ahead to see how we might develop our craft and whose stories we may be shaping. As newer technology and emerging networks come within our grasp what will they tell and how will they tell it?

My digital story began at an editors conference when I was Managing Editor of a BBC local radio station. We were being shown stories from the first digital storytelling workshop held by BBC Wales. (we decided workshop was a better word than Boot Camp to describe the non competitive experience of storytelling)

It was under the agenda heading of User Generated Content. I was riveted and thought to myself – If ever there’s an opportunity to work in this area I want to be at the front of the queue.

12 months later I was in a BBC Wales Training Trainers workshop with Daniel Meadows (http://www.photobus.co.uk) -  and eight other people recruited to what would be BBC Telling Lives – we would soon be gathering stories for the BBC from the English Regions.

In that training workshop I made my first digital story:

Play: Sleeping Under Cover

I had been a BBC producer and journalist for many years but no one had ever asked me for my story before.

I soon came to realise that this process of producing television was different. More intimate, honest and authentic.

I was used to telling other people’s stories – in fact I took away other people’s stories, processed them and delivered them back in a voice the original storyteller didn’t recognise.

Now I was giving the storyteller editorial control and the skills to tell the story themselves.

The stories felt more interesting and engaging than many of those produced day in day out by the “professionals”.

There’s not much heart in a newsroom – there’s a lot of heart in a digital storytelling workshop.

Telling Lives lasted three and a half years and then the BBC brought it to an end. “We’ve pioneered the process and now if anyone wants to produce this kind of television they can put in their bids for commissions.”

So I left the BBC and started digistories. No team or back up – I took to the road with an estate car full of kit and helped people across England to tell their stories and I’m still doing it.

Every workshop is a surprise. There’s always a point when I say “I never knew that!”

I have little – no – no experience of Asia – but I meet lots of people who trace their roots here – who now live in Britain. I was working with a group of young people in The Bangladeshi Community Centre in Walsall in the English region called the West Midlands. I was nowhere near Bangladesh!

In the story circle Neema was the last to tell her story. Up to now the young people had all been interesting in their own way but I wasn’t expecting this:

Right vs Wrong (This is a text version of Neema’s Story. The digital story is no longer on the BBC server)

Neema told that story about ten months after the event. Her father told me that she’d never spoken about her experience before and he was really thankful that the workshop had helped her tell it. She didn’t just tell it for her own benefit – or his – it was broadcast on BBC1 Newsround on the first anniversary on the July 7th bombings in London.

Since then the world of technology has changed considerably. Social networking and cloud computing were almost unknown terms in 2006. Mobile phones had cameras – even video – but today they have almost as much computing power and media tools as a home laptop did then.

Today facebook is one of the largest community of communities in the world.

105 million Twitter users send 65 million messages every day.

YouTube has become the most watched video platform in the world – perhaps evidence that many are bored with the real time feed of television chosen by the schedulers and prefer to “pick their own”

People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. YouTube Fact Sheet http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet

But few of those videos are digital stories and we need more to stand alongside the professionally produced television, promotional and “how to” videos and the self indulgent trash that has sadly become the trade mark for User Generated Content.

The Digital Storytelling Community has done an excellent job of devising the form and creating a template. A personal narrative, 2 minutes, 12 – 20 pictures.

And I’m a believer that you can’t break the rules or push the boundaries if you haven’t discovered them first.

So who’s breaking the boundaries?

I think young people are. If I’m leading a workshop of young people they always teach me things – some of them I’d rather not know – but they are great experimenters.

I trained a team of museum workers in the North East of England who went on to run a project called Culture Shock. http://www.cultureshock.org.uk Essentially they are museum staff, using objects in their collections to inspire stories from the local community which are then added to their collection. I taught them how to work to a template” which they adopted for Culture Shock.

They invited me back after a year to listen to what they’d learned. Like me – they’d discovered that young people like to push the boundaries.

Thomas Elwick told me about his experience.:

Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMxtVOyE37o

I’d love to see more director’s cuts!

I am also keen that in the future we make digital storytelling more accessible to people with disabilities. It’s too easy to let the literate and capable fill our workshops.

As part of a series of workshops for young people I was asked to work with Stepping Out, a program to prepare young adults with learning disabilities for college courses.

When Rebecca was first asked to share just her name and something interesting with a larger group she was lost for words and simply broke down in tears.

This is perhaps what she would have liked to have said:-

Film: Treat Me Good – Rebecca Jones

These young people had limited skills – but some were regular Facebook users and most enjoyed processing images from their cameras and making digital scrapbooks. It’s was a short step from there to being able to tell a digital story.

So now I’ve started – let’s look to the future

When I was first asked to speak in Singapore I started to think about technology – the toys and gadgets pouring onto the market that increase the range of tools we can use for digital storytelling. But to be honest they are grey boxes incapable of creating anything without the spark of human imagination driving the smaller and smaller buttons and screens! We need people who can say – wouldn’t it be great if we could …. and then go out to make it happen.

Can I suggest that in the future we need to hold true to the ethos of digital storytelling.

Everywhere I go people ask if they can make informational or promotional films in my workshops rather than telling a personal story. For me the integrity of digital stories is in their genesis – the truth as I see it – a personal narrative - yes it’s dramatic, yes it’s told as a story, yes it’s structured to hold the audience, but at the end of it people are transformed in their view of the world and their understanding of individual experience.

I love history – but it’s weakness is that it’s usually the story of the successful, the winners, the powerful. And those stories – the promotional, the didactic, the big picture will continue to be told. But we have the means for telling and recording the story of the small, the weak, and the powerless. Let’s not squander it.

If you, as digital storytellers, want to use your skills to  make this happen then you too should be willing to be weak and vulnerable and to tell your story .. and then to encourage others to do the same. Every time I show “Sleeping Under Cover” I wonder what people will think – of me. But it’s who I am – think what you like!

In the past we’ve depended on the past as the resource or the mine of our digital stories. Fuzzy black and white or faded colour snapshots of families and children, memories of growing up and childhood days.

I find that many young and vulnerable people don’t have lots of photographs. The means to capture images has never been more prolific – but that also makes those pictures cheap and disposable.

My house overlooks a visitors car park and most tourists who come to the city of York start their walking tour right under my nose. I’m always amused at the people, mostly from this part of the world, who stand at the end of my very ordinary street and enthusiastically take pictures and videos. I often wonder what happens to those images  – and what they say when they get back home! I guess most of them never see the light of day again and end up in some digital trash can to make room for the next hastily snatched images of somewhere else.

I say this to illustrate how we gather pictures today. Many are not stored – some may be uploaded to Facebook – if we’re lucky.

So the future of digital storytelling may have to be about now rather than then. The workshop would include image taking – going out and capturing the pictures to tell the story and not depending on a non existent or chaotic archive.

In my experience young people live in the now and the future. The past is a messy collection of embarrassing situations and confused feelings of the process of growing up. But now and the future is where their lives are lived.

Lewis had no pictures to tell his story in a project called “The Truth About Youth”. He knew what he wanted to say so he and his friends took the pictures during the workshop.

Play: Why do teachers have to talk like this?

As technology makes capturing stories more portable and accessible lets use it to talk about now.

I’m not an academic and I usually find academic papers a bit dense and dry – but this one, about a digital storytelling project in Africa, caught my imagination. They had to find alternatives to the story driven approach to digital story telling because people they were working with needed the visual promptings of their surroundings to fire their imaginations. So their workshops were based on pictures taken in a single week. On the spot (See Designing with Mobile Digital Storytelling in Rural Africa )

I think that a need for this kind stimulus isn’t just confined to Africa.

A final question:

Who are we telling our stories to?

As a journalist I think all stories should be “out there”.

I know that many gain valuable therapy and personal realisation through exploring their own story. They end up being unfinished or unpublished. They are made for the benefit of the storyteller rather than for an audience. I made it a rule of engagement to ask how the stories made in the workshops would be published. I wanted to know. I have turned  jobs down where the results were only for “internal use only”.

So I want to challenge you. Make stories for publication.  If we make our stories for publication – will it it lessen personal value? If, by the process of storytelling (essentially a process to communicate with others) we are better able to place ourselves in the community in which we exist, will we not all be better understood and equipped. Equipped to explain who we are and what matters to us in all areas of life?

Unpublished stories are incomplete – they are children never brought to birth or at best they exist only for the parent. Unrecognised in their own right.

Let stories serve their purpose – let them loose into the wild – publish them.

In the process of producing stories for an audience you will be more disciplined. You’ll think of others. Will they watch? What will they think? What will they discover? Who am I doing this for? What do I really want to say?

And yet too many stories remain hidden away on hard drives, DVDs and memory sticks – while the glow of the workshop slowly fades and the experience of it is swallowed up in the more pressing demands of life.

When Greg Dyke was the director general of the BBC, asked me this question.

“I watch hundreds of hours of television in the course of my job and most of it is soon forgotten so tell me Barrie, why can I still remember the first digital story I ever watched?”

That first story was about domestic violence – perhaps the kind of narrative that might have been kept under wraps. But it was published on the BBC Capture Wales site. It’s called “Scratching the Surface” told by Debbie Ridout who used to hide bank notes behind the wallpaper so that her violent partner didn’t find them.  You can watch it now – it’s still there. Scratching the Surface

Wrap

So As I look to the future I say

Be vulnerable

Give the unheard a voice

Talk about now

and

Publish, publish, publish.

It’s all ready. Script, Keynote Presentation, Digital Stories and Images all in line and ready for my keynote to the 2nd Asian Digital Storytelling Congress tomorrow. I’m not sure what people are expecting but I do know what they’re getting.

I’m looking to the the future. I suppose we all think the future is shaped by new technology and networking opportunities, but I’m convinced that our imaginations and integrity are really the key. Where we go depends much more on the destination we want to reach than it does on the transport. So with digital storytelling. What dreams do we have? What is it that you just wish you could do? What stands in the way of you doing it? These questions are far more important than what new toys are coming onto the market to help us put stories together.

I’m also looking forward in the much shorter term to meeting new friends and possibly a few old ones too.

Joe Lambert at the Digital Storytelling Festival DS5 in Aberystwyth. I made notes on his talk but this is much better than reading it through the filter of my inadequate summary.

DS5 Joe Lambert Keynote from Esko Reinikainen on Vimeo.

The second day started with a motivational presentation by DK of MediaSnackers which he entitled Making the Net Work. “To go forward you have to look sideways at what’s happening in other sectors” and then, in his warm Welsh accent, DK uttered the names of huge commercial organisations that are often despised by artists and enthusiasts for their blatant marketing on social networking sites. But he persuaded us that some of them had useful strategies that we could deploy to open the dialogue with our users and contacts. “Learn, don’t throw stones”

For example, once a month senior staff at Ford Motors are online answering questions from customers in the belief that interacting is more than advertising. Brands are trying to be human.

DK went on to say that we should be ourselves on social networking sites, displaying a photo of ourselves, and using real names where practical. This forced me to reveiw my digistories profile on Twitter. I have now added my name to the profile – not just in the biog, and my face to the plain text digistories logo.

He also impressed me with his section about playing. Play is the best method of learning, but the older we get the less we play. You won’t find many games on my iPhone or my MacBook Pro. Do I need to play more? Well it started me thinking about introducing play into some of the contexts in which I’m expected to teach and to engage in a lunchtime conversation about writing non linear narrative suitable for games. A small spark can ignite a whole new way of working. If you want to see more of DK’s presentation it’s here

DK was followed in sharp contrast by Lynn Gardner, Theatre critic of The Guardian. While DK urged us to play, experiment and see what’s possible, Lynn was far more conservative in her adoption of the latest technology. Listening to her reminded me of sitting under the gaze of a head mistress as she gently told us what was best for us all. She conceded that while the web had been bad for newspapers it had been good for journalism. She is now able to sit at her desk and glean live updates from around the globe. She felt that innovation was more likely to make people go to the theatre and not replace it. She also welcomed the way the internet community had matured over time – in particular the communities clustered around The Guardian’s Comment is Free blogs.

Since digital downloads have upset the money making models of the music publishing industry, have you noticed how much more important live music has become? Rohan Gunatillake brought it to our attention in his session at Shift Happens as he introduced Why the Edinburgh Festivals are like the Web. He suggested that in times of adversity festivals are very important because they are endued with spiritual and cultural values. What makes an event a festival? 1. Content – themes – programmes. 2. Boundary – place or time. 3. Social Spaces – eg meal times and coffee breaks. 4. Market Place for vendors. Perhaps the festival would like to install Rohan as as Geek in Residence.

Jocelyn Upendram followed with a useful tutorial on Creative Commons licensing in the UK. It made more sense that I had previously understood. Watch the YouTube version here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3rksT1q4eg

Tim Wheeler and Alison Short introduced Mind the Gap theatre which specialises in providing a theatre experience for people with disabilities amused us all with their mission statement “To boldly go where everyone else has gone before” – although I suspect their VR Studio Tours, complete with actors, are way out in front of most of us.

After lunch, when I was recorded in a short interview with Colm O’Rourke of Khaoz Media, Abhay Ahikhari held us all spell bound. I didn’t make many notes – it probably wasn’t that kind of talk – but I do remember him blaming his esoteric approach on his multi-faith upbringing and drifting into Japanese as he recalled a visit to Tokyo and Osaka – and he encouraged us to listen to his soundscapes.

Which leads neatly on to an iPhone game in sound only introduced by Adam Stanning of Punk Pie. The best way to experience Aurifi, it is to part with all of £1.19 at the iPhone App Store.

As the temperature rose in the Theatre Royal my eye lids sank and I confess to some black holes in my note taking for the afternoon. Ian Aspin of Really Good Thinking did keep me awake with his motivational presentation about using new technology to make the world a better place. He challenged us to answer the question, “What is the point of what we’re doing?” and then went on to ask even bigger questions about the meaning of life and the purpose on being here. You’d be better looking at his Really Good Thinking website if you want to start finding the answers.

A transatlantic link to New York brought Alice Grunwald via Skype to the audience in a tricky two screen presentation involving slides and live streaming. It worked and she told us about the Memorial Museum being built at the site of the Twin Towers designed to help people make sense of the events of 9/11.  She introduced the memorial website featuring a mashup of still images from the site and Google Streetview – then and now so to speak. The museum will gather the most extensive archive linked to one historical event. The story about people – loss and hope.

An environmental duet followed. Hannah Rudman – envirodigital – get digital – be greener. She had worked for Amb:IT:ion in Scotland. Sian Alexander of Julie’s Bicycle is campaigning to reduce the carbon footprint of the music industry. They both posed questions about the need to travel when we could link. Almost as if it was planned to illustrate the point of the previous campaigners, David Sable introduced NT Live and how some productions at the National Theatre had been beamed live, in HD, to up to 320 cinemas across the world. I was impressed that in one night they put as many bums on seats as they had in the entire run of the same production at the 800 seater theatre.

Finally to the Keynote from Jonathan Harris who delighted us with his artistic approach to data sets, starting with words and progressing through various life experiences to his current project of a photo a day. It’s all about exploring inner landscapes –  secrets. He showed us intriguing graphical web sites that beautifully displayed the results of data he’d gathered.  One particularly fascinating collection garners sentences from blogs that contain the word “feeling” which became a book We Feel Fine. Later, through a series of spectacular and at times disturbing images, he told us about his journey to solitude and how the the owl was significant to him. He talked about the importance of signs in our lives and said  ”We live so much in our rational minds that we have lost touch with our intuitions …. we need to get out of heads and into our hearts a little more”. Experience some of his work on his site number27.org

This has been a long post but I hope it has served to convey something of the stimulating event which was ShiftHappens, it’s helped me to make sense of some of my notes and made me realise how much there is to digest and act upon to make shift happen.

I’m at Shift Happens – not far to travel to this event – it’s at the Theatre Royal in York just three minutes walk from my house.

Each of the two days is packed with speakers in the main theatre and surrounded by smaller events, performances and engaging demonstrations. Even food is provided.

Lots of time for networking, there’s an avalanche of tweeting #shifthappens and hot on the heels of DS5 in Aberystwyth it’s good to be inspired again in another area of the arts. This time mainly theatre.

Sadly I missed the Keynote speech from Sir Ken Robinson because I had to rush away to a board meeting of Riding Lights Theatre Company where I’m a trustee. I hope to be able to catch up on his presentation. He was live from San Francisco via Skype. Please say someone recorded it.

I found Hannah Nicklin from Loughborough University truly inspiring. Her presentation on Theatre in theAge of the First Person is available for download.  Best quote “You can’t break the internet – and if you did you’d be famous” – or perhaps it was “There are no experts – we’re all learning” or maybe …….. “

Andy Field of Forest Fringe ended his talk by reading out the responses to a question he posed on Twitter “Art is ….. ” He has posted his speech and the twitter responses on his blog

The day’s events were adequately covered by Colm, of KhaozMediaYork, who is blogging from the event.

Word of the day Pervasive

Alex Henry (Culture Shock!) showed nothing of the nerves she confessed to after the event, as she made her presentation to the the DS5 Festival. I am very familiar with the Culture Shock project. I was involved in a small way in the initial bid and subsequently in providing the training for the teams gathering digital stories in the North East.

Alex professionally took us through the progress and purpose of her project, leaving the emotion to the storytellers whose films were shown to capably illustate how successful the teams have been. They all prompted enthusiastic applause. If Alex had been in any doubt about addressing a theatre full of hardy workshop leaders, she had no need to doubt the status of her experience. Her peers were endorsing Culture Shock as authentic. She had a thing or two to say about accessioning and archiving “the collection” which makes everyone who gathers digital stories outside of the Museums discipline, feel uncomfortable. If the movement has a weakness it’s in recording and storing our collections.

But one thing Alex said stood out to me. She talked about her hopes for the future after the Culture Shock project has finished. What about the legacy of the skills? What would happen to the equipment they had bought and the people that had been trained – both workshop leaders and storytellers? Could a way be found to place those resources in the community so that people could continue telling stories?

Perhaps something could be written into the initial bids for funds that defined what happens at the end. “Equipment to be placed in community projects/venues with the ambition of giving the project a legacy” That would stop the bureaucratic vultures descending and commandeering the resources – just because the kit is shinier than their office or studio’s existing kit. It would be much easier to say – “Sorry, it already has a home!”

I wish I had done that with the Telling Lives kit when I left the BBC. Perhaps someone somewhere would still be proudly polishing those G4 Powerbooks as they reflected on the people whose stories had been crafted on them instead of them gathering dust because “it’s a Mac and it might come in useful one day”.