Pass the Ship

Just finished work on this little bastard, and I think he's going to be a real wonder-worker.

Started off with a javascript app I found on the internets, dragged the bookmarklet to my web browser and on *click* a space ship a la 1980's-cira asteroids shows up on your screen and you can blast way little web site elements.

Google "I feel lucky" - boom!
Video button by a news story - boom!

and so on.

Quite entertaining, but I thought that the level of abstraction needed to go one step further.

//start digression//

Start with your web-browser - it's an abstraction. What you're doing is saying let's take a physical object - think a photo album - and represent through the computer.

What was a 'physical' picture in your photo album is now a digital picture.
What was the 'physical' page you turned in your photo album is now an electronic transition from one photo to another.

So you're taking the three dimensional and collapsing it to no-dimensions. (The computer has width, height, depth, but what is showing is no-dimensional.) So it's really a non-local idea of something from the real world.

You then take another non-local idea - the space ship - and attack the first.

An idea attacking an idea.
//end digression

So I held down the right cursor key, speeding the little triangulr wreaker-of-havoc around and around my screen; off the borders into nowhere from the lower right, returning from its hyperspace on the upper left. Then carefully

*carefully*

I smushed the little bugger on the laptop screen. Simple index finger pushdown, and the spaceship looked like a squashed bug. This, of course, was not to the spaceship's liking

Buzzing under my finger like a spurned queen bee; I raise my finger just a little bit and he makes a dash for it so

I put my whole hand down on the screen and he's scrambling manically and I let my hand up a bit and imagine his surprise when he makes a break for the edge of the screen and hyperspace and I'm there, pinching him with the other hand between thumb and forefinger.

I pull him out from the screen towards me and the screen a gelatinous sheet pulls out

and I pull

and step back

and we have a whole curtain sheet action happening now, characters and images are crawling up the sides of the tented screen fabric but I'm still pinching and now

I'm turning and twisting the screen fabric and the little triangle is drawing blood

As liberated as he thinks he is, *actually* being liberated is a whole nother level

but a good one, I tell him as I give one finally pull and like a bug out of flesh he's out of the screen and blinking between my thumb and finger

I surmise that like a fish out of water he does not have long without the screen, so carefully push him back on the upper right hand corner of my screen and pull him again - slowly like cheese to my colleague's computer then a quick push down then another taffy pull to another colleauges computer and so on until we have 5 - has to be 5 - computers linked up and from there

The worlds criss cross into each other, plane perpendicular to plane sliding through one another with grace and gloss

And the ship's captain grows from an idea to an idea of an idea

And as the abstractions grow, the atmosphere between computers becomes cobbed and cloudy and now there is electricity between them and they're glowing in a perverse goldden ratio and then, only then

the prime(er) mover turns off his screen

and I blink off

taking the space ship and my invention

back,

back,

into the soup

from whence we came.