Imagination and the World Wide Web

(By Joel Robinson)

About a couple months ago this image was making it's rounds around the Internet.  In short it went viral.  I found it on my brother Steven's Facebook page, who shared it from George Takei's fan page.

I connected to it immediately.  This image represents my life; the inner worlds I live within.  Each World is rich and vibrant, with fun, interesting characters.  My family has learned that when I start laughing to let me laugh and not ask what I find funny.  My Dad learned this the hard way over ten years ago.  He begged me to tell him why I was laughing.  "Trust me, you don't want to know!" "What is it?"  I merely shook my head, "You'll regret it."  "No I won't."  Sure enough, about 10 minutes into my explanation, he exclaimed "Stop!  Stop!  Sorry I asked!"  He's also learned not to ask me about the Circle of 5ths.   

I'm a pretty hardcore introvert, textbook introvert, and I wonder sometimes if extraverts live such interesting inner lives.  Back in High School I learned I was the only one in my group of friends who thought in images, they all thought only in words, and that got me thinking about how different we all are in our procressing, thinking, and daydreaming.  

Anyway, I digress.  

This image was created by Joel Robinson.  I found his blog, a great website where he provides free photography tutorials, where he addresses this creation of his.  The title of the post is "The 'Borrowed' Photographer."  The post is actually really sad, where he addresses the Internet's problem of stolen images where credit is not given.  In some instances images are taken and resold.  It's a huge problem.  He's been mocked and made fun of for the image, and it's come to the point where he's learned to be indifferent to his dragon image.

It's a post worth reading, and it's funny that the image I found was one of the altered photo's with Joel's name removed.  

When Steven and I first started putting music online as Cerulean Jade, he said he wanted to put full audio tracks on Youtube.  His claim was that it would end up on there anyway, and it gives people a chance to listen to the full version.  Still, I understand the reasoning, and as artist it helps people find us and get us out there, but Youtube is notorious for songs getting taken and re-posted, with no need to purchase.  Most of the songs we're doing are cover songs, in which we wont be selling, but even with Dream Maze and my two Christmas Songs, only a couple downloads have been purchased.  It honestly encourages me to work harder, to write songs that people will want to buy, because even though I love Dream Maze, and it will sound awesome in Japanese (Steven's working on a translation; we've decided that all our original songs will have a Japanese version that's we'll sing), it's not the sort of style everyone will like.  It's interesting and artistic.  

It is a risk to put things online for free, but at the same time the Internet is an amazing tool.  As a kid I would never have imagined that such a platform and world stage would exist, and I grew up on Star Trek.  Anyone, from all over the world, can find and listen to our music, and that's amazing.

Sarah