For my “Atom as a Case Study” presentation at ETech, I wanted to give the audience a feel for the endless, wearing nastiness in the syndication community. It wasn’t hard to find a couple of samples of ignorant childish vituperation from the week before the conference to hold up as examples, but I thought that a little light relief was in order, too. So I put together a photomontage slide show to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries, 25 pictures of battlefield panoramas, alien invaders, monsters fighting, Mexican wrestling, superhero combat, slavering vampires, frightened soldiers, crashing planes, fantasy warriors with big ugly weapons, and so on. It was kind of amusing, if I say so myself. After the talk someone came up and asked “What tag did you use to find that stuff?” It wasn’t like that; back at home on the weekend I was poking around Google and Yahoo image search looking for things like “combat”, “monster”, “explosion“, “battle”, “weapon”, and so on and the six-year-old cruised by and looked at my screen. Boy, was he ever hooked. So I settled him into the chair beside me and we spent a really enjoyable half-hour cruising the Internet for pictures of violence and destruction (Safe Search definitely on). He was quick to pipe up “Ooh, that one, Daddy!” but puzzled by a couple of my picks. Quality time, they call it, bonding, that kind of thing. Am I a Bad Parent?
