Ever get that feeling that you’re going to break some new creative ground and then you look around at your, until then unknown, sponsored link peers and get a simultaneous feeling of amusement, spleen venting irritation, essence-numbing fatigue and wisenheimer impulses?
Take for example personalized styrofoam cups.
The circumstances are irrelevant, I’ve learned from page views that you all don’t care about me personally, but let’s assume I was some where with a styrofoam cup full of peanuts, a ball point pen and beer. The peanuts were eaten and the beer was drunk. Next up the pen and the cup. Start drawing. Flow happens. It transcends beer and peanuts. The result is in my mind a perhaps unique, personal styrofoam cup.
Anything can be a blog post.
Some time latter a query for “styrofoam cups”. Plenty of lateral references that could(this link is way cool) be(weird link) linked. Query for “personalized styrofoam cups”. Like 11 advertisements from the giant search engine that could. Including exact matches. Whoa. The second link actual made me laugh with it’s “A Good Party Is Only As Good As It’s Weakest Drunk” and it’s “Redneck Stemware“. But then it occurred to me one man (or woman’s) business plan is another man (or woman’s) cheap thrill.
One night’s distraction versus maybe 500 years biodegrading. Yes someone else got the cup for the peanuts but it was my pen. I probably wouldn’t order dozens of cups with a mass-produced cup and a likely domestically printed message of my choice from a menu of pre-written messages. But then if the dinosaurs had personalized styrofoam cups would we know it?
Bold Lentil 
March 8, 2008 at 1:16 pm
“The circumstances are irrelevant, I’ve learned from page views that you all don’t care about me personally, but let’s assume I was some where with a styrofoam cup full of peanuts, a ball point pen and beer. The peanuts were eaten and the beer was drunk.”
WRONG! The circumstances are entirely relevant. If you were merely at home, consuming beer and peanuts, I would be worried. Really. And your act of semi-anti-zeitgeist styrofoam decorating loses its cache. Now, it sounds as if you were attending some sort of professional sports event, as beer and peanuts (in my humble experience)are the preferred consumables at such things. That changes things altogether. For one, you are not sadly eating beer and peanuts at home, you are out with the commoners. and experiencing life in 21st century America. Secondly, your artwork has been produced in a venue not usually associated with spontaneous acts of creation.
See? Entirely different picture.
March 8, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I sit corrected. The beer and peanuts were consumed in a bar with neighbors, strangers, a cave-like dimness and blaring sporting events on multiple televisions. Also not a standard venue for styrofoamoglyph creation… I perhaps should have stated the superficially interesting parts of my day until that point in time are most likely irrelevant.
March 13, 2008 at 10:14 pm
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April 7, 2008 at 10:22 am
When subjected to high pressure, like in the free-flood area of the USS James Madison SSBN-627, styrofoam cups shrink to the size of shot glasses. I’m not suggesting that crew members would hide styrofoam cups in free-flood areas of nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines prior to departing Kings Bay, Georgia for 3 months – but if they did, the cups might look like this: http://www.nauticalvows.com/cups.htm
April 7, 2008 at 10:30 am
pfm: nice – “the pressure increases, and slowly sucks the air out of the styrofoam material”. So tell me how far underwater do you suppose you have to take a pumpkin before it implodes?