J’ai passé le weekend dernier assis derrière une table étroite à regarder les gens passer devant ma table à l’Expozine.

Je vendais récents, mon PREMIER FANZINE. J’en suis tout content. Il contient deux vieilles histoires et une nouvelle (histoire) de 3 pages dessinée spécialement pour l’occasion.

C’était vraiment le fun, mais en même temps épuisant : L’Expozine est une épreuve difficile. Au moins j’étais assis entre Edouard Bond et Antonin Buisson, sur une grande table qui accueillait aussi la gang de Front Froid, Cathon, Djanice, Kaylynn, Joseph et plusieurs autres (quelqu’un a appelé ça «la table des cool»). Aussi, de la bière.

Merci à tout le monde qui s’est déplacé pour venir me dire bonjour. J’ai hâte de refaire ça!

Je viens de mettre en ligne, «officiellement», le site web de mon frère, le très talentueux Rafael Sottolichio.

www.rafaelsottolichio.com

Aussi, j’ai créé un nouveau portfolio, plus à jour, pour que vous puissiez admirer mon talent (et me contacter pour du travail).

www.utopsie.com/portfolio_2011

Une nouvelles année commence, et avec elle des promesses qu’on se fait à soi-même. Généralement je garde ça pour moi, c’est moins gênant, en juin, quand t’as rien fait, personne te demande «pis, le truc, là, tu l’as-tu fait?» Mais là je suis en train de travailler sur une nouvelle version de ce blog, et je suis pas mal excité par ce qui s’en vient. Trop hâte!

The Internet is now almost 20 years old (depending of how you split the hairs) and its effect on life, industry and society has been massive. I’ve been thinking about what’s next, and how the Digital Life will continue to affect us, and what the consequences will be on everyday life. Here are some of my reflections.

I’ve divided these into predictions for this year, the next five years, and the coming decade. I had planned to go with ten trends, but this is the era of generosity (see #20). If you read ’til the end, I’d really like to have your opinions on these. Thanks.

1 /1 year – Handmade papercraft construction designs will die of overexposure
You’ve seen these just about everywhere, they are very cool. But it is inevitable that creativity-challenged advertising agencies will destroy this idea, the same way they destroyed the “viral video”. By using them to sell cheap and tacky products that no one wants or needs, and plastering everything you can see with their sub-quality version. It will act as a vaccine and nobody will be able to even look at these without throwing up. By the end of 2010, this cool trend will be dead.

2 /1 year – The Apple Tablet will change the world
Just like nobody was able to predict the shape, functions and market-shifting powers of the iPhone, the Thing That Has Yet To Be Revealed will fill a gigantic hole that exists exactly in everyone’s blind spot. And it will be huger that huge. Today, every. single. phone. manufacturer is doing an exact clone of the iPhone, while not even coming close to its level of quality and richness of experience. In 2010 Apple will repeat this apparently superhuman feat once again. I will give you my own predictions about this in an upcoming post.

3 /1 year – Comics will explode on the upcoming and yet unannounced Apple Tablet
Of course this fabled Magic Tablet still only exists in the imagination of… everyone, actually. But, like Microsoft, all they can imagine it doing is the old stuff in a new box. E-Books, email and web browsing. Now imagine a comic book page, in full color, zoomable and digitally distributed. Remember that a scanned comic book is just a bunch of jpegs, and zips right down that Torrent hose you got plugged into that computer of yours. Books without pictures do not stand a chance.

4 /1 year – Personal media
Facebook, Twitter and blogs will reach even further into the mediasphere, eating up more and more valuable space that was previously dominated by Big Media. Breaking News are, uh, broken more and more by, um, regular ol’ people. The main part of a journalist’s job in 2010 will be separated into two parts. 1: complain about how irresponsible the masses are, with their twittering and somesuch, and 2: joining the new world and participating themselves. Of course, you know which ones I think will still have a job by the end of the decade.

5 /1 year /5 years /10 years – Copyright Schmopyright
Copyright and digital distribution issues are still in the air, but it’s a safe bet that some semblance of solution will have taken hold by the end of the decade. One thing is clear is that the existing model is broken and the new one has not been installed yet. Personally, I’m leaning towards a monthly all-you-can-eat digital content subscription that would include music, movies, books, games, and anything else we haven’t thought of yet. Among other things, it would get rid of piracy. More on this later.

6 /5 years – The Cloud becomes The Fog
Clouds are up in the sky. Way up. Walking in a city today it’s still rare to find a Wi-Fi connection that lets you tweet, update your facebook and read your email everywhere. But in a relatively near future, the cloud comes down to street level. It becomes The Fog. Wi-Fi (or whatever replaces it) will, eventually, inevitably, become as accessible – if not more – as radio waves. Being disconnected will be the exception.

7 /5 years – Ubiquitous access
Subway rides will be the perfect example of this. You will read your news, check out the highlights of last night’s game – or party – and generally go about your digital life while sitting comfortably until you get to your station. Reading a dead-tree news paper will become a little embarrassing. Like, for idiots and tree-killers.

8 /5 years – Invisible, infinite storage
A good example is the personal media player. Storage will eventually disappear, replaced by a managed key that gives you access either to what you have purchased, or to you digital media subscription. It will be an antenna, not a box.

9 /5 years – Screen resolution becomes meaningless
As much in small handheld, arms-length or wall-hung devices, screen resolution is going through a turmoil. 480p, 720, 1080, 4k, whatever! Because of the exploding multitude of formats available today, combined with the incoming and never-ending formats coming in tomorrow, most people will just give up and read/watch what they want in whatever format is accessible at the moment they want to access it. You can’t expect people to buy a $2000 plasma screen this year and to get a new one next year. Expect resolution-independent design to become the next interface trend.

10 /5 years – One More Thing from Apple
More and more fictitious yet amazing Apple products will be willed into existence by the Collective Hive Mind. Apple will retain its central position as the R&D department for the entire tech industry.

11 /5 years – Movies get longer still
We’ve been seeing this in the last couple of years from the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, the Wachowski brothers and James Cameron. Digital technology and ego inflation are pushing this trend very firmly. There will come a time when a movie rental and a TV-Series rental will be indistinguishable in length.

12 /5 years – Computers become smarter
Repetitive tasks will finally be taken over by the smart computer. Whenever it senses you doing the same thing more than three times in a row, it will ask you if you want it to take over for you. A simple enough concept, but nobody seems to be putting their brain cycles on this one.

13 /5 years – Magazines and Blogs will merge
As the traditional magazine’s structure, content, distribution and readership are increasingly overtaken by blogs, they will merge into a new “thing” that will be a morph of the two, and which has yet to be named. The fact that you will read both of them on your Tablet in the bathroom will further muddy the distinction.

14 /5 years – The emergence of Personal Media
Maybe this will be the name of that new thing. There was a time when a major weekly publication needed an office full of people to merely exist. Today a fat guy with a laptop can and does compete – successfully – with that old structure. Digital technology has allowed solitary geeks to make bedroom music and movies, and now it will allow them to publish full-blown “magazines”. Glossy-quality publications about personal obsessions, be it Barbie collections, obscure bands or world affairs. The little fanzine that could, will.

15 /5 years – Better battery life
In the same way a fish cannot conceive of the existence of birds living on trees, I see nothing in this direction. The future seems closed.  I just keep hoping that within 5 years a new, unexpected technology will… happen, that will do for portable energy storage what has been happening to portable computing’s processing power. Allowing us to envision 10-day power and infinitely rechargeable batteries.

16 /10 years – Ubiquitous manufacturing
This is barely starting now, it’s still in the realm of garage-geeks and science fiction, but personal fabrication machines, 3D printers, replicators, whatever you might want to call them, are coming, and they are coming to a counter near you. They will become a fact of life. That handle that broke off your laptop, the pen cap you lost, the switch on that lamp that isn’t working like it used to? You will be able to download a file, or scan it, and then print an exact and functional replica. This will reduce the quantity of broken coffee machines you will find on the side of the street come garbage day.

17 /10 years – The death of Journalism
Journalism as we know it – something that has only existed since de mid-19th century – will die its inescapable death, and not without an ugly fight. But it is going away, as surely as vinyl LPs and gas-powered lighting. In its place, a form of “human media” will emerge. A global village conversation, which disappeared when the emerging broadcast model was incapable of scaling it to the masses it was distributed to. Journalism will have been a chapter, a temporary blindness. I mean, do you really believe in the fiction that they call the “objective voice”?

18 /10 years – The new Privacy
Today you expect to be able to access all information. Yet you also expect to be able to block certain facts from that access. Really, who do you think will win that fight? Google and Wikipedia (and the things that will replace these) will know everything about you and about everyone and everything else. This is not something that we will escape. Human curiosity knows no limits, and you and your life are subject to it. It will take a long time, but people will eventually get used to this and get on with their connected lives. And wonder how the hell did they even function before.

19 /10 years – American popular culture opens up to the World
Maybe it’s because the Web will have beaten them to the punch, but within the next ten years, Hollywood will finally accept the fact that the rest of the world’s culture has value, and will start releasing dubbed movies, instead of crappy remakes with Ted Danson. Also, the studios will realize that it’s way cheaper this way.

20 /10 years – Generosity
Giving things away, doing more than what is expected, access to cheap power, communications and resources, these will usher in a new era of plenty. The poor will be rich. Websites and piracy are conditioning us to this frame of  mind, and it will want to expand to everything else in your life. The decade of Twenty Ten will be the decade of generosity.

Ne sachant que répondre je prends mon iPhone et je tape “wikipedia pâté chinois” dans le browser. Une minute après j’avais ma réponse, que je lus à haute voix. Apparemment il y a deux versions de l’histoire, une ayant rapport avec les chinois qui travaillaient à la construction du chemin de fer transcanadien, et l’autre avec une ville dans le Maine appelée South China. Mais vous pouvez avoir plus de détails ici : Wikipedia – Pâté Chinois

Le but de cette histoire n’est pas de vous enseigner les détails du Steak-Blé d’Inde-Patates – que vous venez d’apprendre bien malgré vous (c’est capoté pareil comment ça marche l’éducation, an ?) mais de souligner le fait qu’aujourd’hui l’information – TOUTE l’information – est disponible au bout des doigts, a portée de conscience et pratiquement sans le moindre effort. Comme l’air qu’on respire. Il n’y a plus vraiment d’excuse à l’ignorance. Pas besoin d’être un gros geek, ou un gourou de la tech pour accéder à ça, faut juste avoir un cell, et vous en avez tous un. Un ordi à la rigueur.

Fuck, combien de questions, combien de réponses pour un esprit qui est en train de faire son éducation ? Enfant, je me suis demande longtemps qui était l’Homme éléphant, épluchant les livres des bibliothèques du quartier et de l’école, sans rien trouver de satisfaisant, des années avec cette question. Aujourd’hui c’est inconcevable. Aujourd’hui premièrement Google va me linker à une quantité astronomique de data, mais surtout, et c’est ce qui donne le vertige, c’est que tous ces liens existent, quelqu’un a mis toutes ces informations, toutes ces connaissances en ligne, gratuitement, accessibles à tous.

Trente secondes pour une réponse à toute question.

Une reponse validée, commentée, détaillee et enrichie. La réponse d’un expert. De manière transparente, accessible comme l’air qu’on respire. Et mes enfants sont en train de grandir dans ce monde.

Ma fille aînée a neuf ans. Dans quelques années elle aura – vraisemblablement – un téléphone cellulaire. Et maintenant je réalise que son PREMIER cell sera probablement dix fois plus puissant et connecté que le iPhone que je tiens en ce moment dans mes mains (oui je suis en train de bloguer dans le Metro, entre Laurier et Mont-Royal) qui est quand même le boutte de la marde. Son niveau zéro est déjà au-délà de ce qui est possible en ce moment.

The future is strange and we have no idea.

 
Link to page on TED.com HERE

Voici un robot que vous verrez prochainement dans ma BD Rocket Space Ship. Lui et ses amis ont vraiment hâte de vous raconter leur histoire.

So I thought I would clean house for 2009 and redesign my blog. Well it’s not like I thought that up today, I’ve been working on this — on and off — for a couple of months (mostly off) and now it is finally ready. Mostly. There are still the portfolios «under construction» but I HAD to get something online for the 25th. Done. And you can go check out Rocket Space Ship, the webcomic i’ve been working on since the end of december.

WordPress is a wonderful tool and I’ve gotten very familiar with it, with php, with plugins, etc. It’s a lot fo fun.

So have a look around, enjoy, kick the tires. Leave a comment. And have a nice day.

I know I will, it’s my birthday.

Au milieu de tout ça je croise une petite madame sur Saint-Denis qui arborait un si beau sourire, tout simple, presque un sourire d’enfant, que sans même m’en rendre compte je me mets à sourire. Pas à elle, qui était déjà quelques pas plus loin derrière moi, mais à moi-même. Un genre de sourire intérieur, mais étampé dans ma face.

Et un sentiment de joie toute simple, sorti je ne sais d’où, coupant à travers toute la merde compliquée de la vie moderne, du froid, de la ville dure et de la misère de vivre.

Comme une fleur.

Ça m’a mis de bonne humeur pour le reste de la journée et je me suis demandé si mon propre sourire n’avait pas transmis cet heureux virus le long de mon trajet jusqu’au bureau.

Comme un bâillement, mais… avec un sourire.