Thanks to products like iPad, and software from Blio and Quark, the practice of reading may be on the brink of redefinition. A brink … and maybe, a new way to think.

After creating several titles based on our own mediabook format (MBooks), we faced an unpleasant reality when Apple introduced iPad. Online digital booksellers distribute products based on format-standards, often their own. This is okay if you’re selling books developed for .epub or .mobi. We weren’t. MBooks were based on blended narrative — video, audio, text and animation – wrapped together in custom-program. No matter how worthy our years of research and programming, we had to adopt a new standard. The only format even close to what we’d been doing was the just-announced Blio standard, from KNFB.
Since Blio and its authoring requirements were unknown in the beginning, the only option was to spend the time wisely, breaking out media-assets from our MBooks products as we awaited the specifics of a new “wrapper.” This was when we did a crash-dive into “scribing,” also described as “white-boarding on steroids.”
We’d actually been doing a form of scribing for years. But it was geezer-scribing. Slow-paced and cheap in terms of effort. A funky little illustration here, maybe; a ten-frame animation, there. Inevitably, the graphical style was coarse and fairly screamed “the author is seriously lazy.”
What changed was seeing some of the stunning white-board work from RSA-Animate
Since we were already retooling the files rather extensively, we decided to refry the new editions in the style of info-scribing.
Introduction to LifePlanning is actually the test footage from our first effort at resetting the content. Excerpted from a religious production that runs approximately 30-minutes, we’re generally happy with the new direction. The information scales perfectly to today’s “media-mind,” and conveys highly resolved content … to any age-group. That was our goal all along.
After dead-tree books, what happens next? Click on Introduction to LifePlanning and maybe you’ll see what’s next.

 With the Internet, people are still serving their headspace, but what exactly are they being served?

Not all that long ago, Steve Jobs famously suggested that no one reads anymore. Maybe not, but everyone’s blogging as if someone is. What’s going on here? Everybody writes, but nobody reads?

Recently, I tracked comments to an insightful article on demographics. My blood chilled when I discovered several responses along these lines: what I read was interesting, but too long, or I lost interest after the first paragraph.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but this could be a sign of a problem. I wonder if our efforts to simplify prose, cutting down on dependent clauses and paring the sentences to the fewest possible words, is coming back to bite us. For our well-intentioned efforts at simplifying narrative, have we spawned simple-mindedness?

As we endeavor to understand the new narrative venues for the Internet, there are a few questions, someone should ask. Is the transmission of ideas that pass there, truly free? Is the transmission worthy and sustainable? Does it seek to objectify its transmission? Does it promote summary or thesis? Is it worthy of the broad traditions in language and scholarship?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but my instincts tell me we’ve got a few problems.

I’m not suggesting that the whole of human-enlightenment hangs in the balance, but scholarship may be the ultimate victim in this new paradigm. Kicking around the history of language, I found this curious bit from Plato. As we look to transplant ourselves into the new domain of narrative, my revised text here, of the original translation, suggests a context for migration.

… for this Internet of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust search engines and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Phaedrus, Plato

For anyone interested in UFO-phenomena, the surprise is two-fold. First, the more you look into the subject, the more compelling it becomes.   Whatever your initial perspective might have been, whether you started out as a believer or not, the more you read, the less likely you are to write the question off. When you’ve explored the subject, you pretty much come to the conclusion, if the sightings are ever linked to cognitive-affliction, it will have corrupted the mindspace of some pretty important people: astronomers, scientists, airline and military pilots, as well as many of the rank and file in America’s space program.

The second surprise has to do with friends and family. If you make the mistake of telling everyone about your curious new interest, many well-intentioned people will probably start worrying about your mental health. For them, anyone who starts to get curious about UFOs and the paranormal is probably headed for time-out with a shrink. Your mother-in-law’s original estimation of you will have been confirmed.

There’s no third surprise, but if there were, it would probably hint that true-believers (or the truly confused), are slightly more informed on the subject than those who don’t believe.

What does this boil down to?

 Well, maybe “silence” is the best course, for those of us interested in the subject. By this point in history, anyone who hasn’t already considered the unsettling reality of UFOs is probably not going to be informed by any revelation we have to make.   

For the non-believer, if you dismiss the prospect of UFOs and off-planetary influences, maybe you ought to try a little experiment. Though it runs contrary to your true belief, try telling four or five people, you’ve decided UFOs represent a another reality. Check out the reaction.  Who knows what your unscientific poll will uncover, but there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll find, strong convictions don’t have to be rooted in deep understanding. And for whatever it’s worth, that cuts both ways. (Keep your tin-foil hat in the closet)

… but more than most historians would care to admit — publically.

Initially, I was a skeptic. If a dictatorial regime, like the one in Nazi Germany, ever hooked up with a race of ETs, you would doubtless see some kind of imprint in its institutional fabric. Who would’ve managed the societal connection? How would it have been managed?

And in this particular case, given the assumed-efficacy of ET-tech, why did Nazi Germany lose the war?

It doesn’t make sense. Nazi research and armament production had no visible warp, suggesting ET-influence. Or did it?

I closed the book on the subject, only to have the question pop back up when I read Mercury-astronaut, Gordo Cooper’s autobiography, Leap of Faith. In it, Cooper tells of a strange encounter with a woman who sketched a technical problem on a napkin, over lunch.  He didn’t know what the diagram was about, and apparently, the woman didn’t either. But she wanted Cooper to get the napkin to some of his friends at NASA. She said they would understand.

Cooper took the napkin to a friend at NASA, who looked it over and asked where he’d gotten it.  Cooper told him what he knew, but left out the most awkward part of the revelation. According to the woman, she’d received the information as a warning, channeled from people on other planets.  Oh, and according to Cooper, the diagram did indeed reveal a flaw in what was, at the time, the top secret design of the space shuttle.

Cooper’s account set off a small alarm in my brain. No, there was no visible impact-crater in Nazi culture where a saucer might’ve crashed, but there were a lot of strange voices being heard by a lot of strange people. Heinrich Himmler believed he was in telepathic communion with a 13^th century Germanic king. Herman Oberth was supposedly in communication with voices, off-planet. Then there were the beautiful, Nazi-era mediums: Maria Orsic, Sigrin, Traute, Gundrun and Heike, all of whom had allegedly channeled technical information from aliens in the Alderberan star system.

L-R: Oberth, Orsic, Himmler

Do I believe the Nazi-myth involving ETs? I have more than a few reservations. But this much I do believe. If there are metaphysical forces in the cosmos, and I believe there are, we have to accept the possibility that their interaction with us just might be crazy, or ulterior, or subversive, or just plain godless.

Here’s the bottom line. The Nazis had more than just a screw, loose. The imprint we do see in their culture is a dark stain – among the darkest ever visited on the planet. And when historians limit themselves to more convenient political constructs, diminishing the prospect of dark souls influenced by darker forces, they cheat the subject.

Something scary lurked in the shadows of Nazi Germany. And a reasonable argument could be made that whatever else it was, it might not have been from around here.

In an early draft, one of the characters in Blood Toys makes a statement about ET-behavior: Six-million Jews died in World War II, with a global death count of maybe 50-million, or more. When someone says ‘ETs mean us no harm or they would’ve done something by now,’ well … maybe they have, and you call it ‘World War II.’ When you find yourself pondering the question of whether ET-intention is good or bad, remember the Nazis – the horse they bet on. That should tell you something about what we’re dealing with here.