If the founders had used Twitter….
There seem to be lots of guys in tech named Paul Allen. The Paul Allen who wrote this is the one who founded Ancestry.com.
Preamble (Declaration of Independence):
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with anoth
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rig
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of sp
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infri
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respective
Well I guess at least we’d have the Eighth and Ninth Amendments in tact!
If you’re on Google+, you should put this Paul Allen in a Circle!
Read MoreNew Show Coming Soon
I’ve done a lot of different little projects over the last year, but mostly I just wondered and wandered. There were several things that kept me from getting back to work: legal advice, depression, taking care of my grandmother, depression, Luria being mean and depression. Another reason is that I ONLY want to do shows that are ultimately better than GeekBrief.TV.
As I flopped around like a fish, I dreamed about the kind of shows I want to make in the new media space. I also practiced making things that look like my dreams and I think I’ve gotten much closer than I did with GeekBrief.TV.
Finding someone as amazing on camera as Luria isn’t easy, and I just don’t think it’s worth trying if you cant work with someone who is really good. Cue the theme music because I finally found someone who is simply amazing when she gets in front of a camera. You’ll get to know her when we launch.
There’s a lot to do in the midst of finishing up another project that is taking for-ev-ER.
Read MoreOne day I’ll probably publish all the emails and iChats related to my divorce because I can’t figure out a reason not to. Whenever a marriage ends there is this idea that, if she left him, he must be bad. No doubt I was in a bad place. I was not sleeping because of crazy fears about the economy and socialism. I was freaking out because of her refusal to get John P. out of our life. I can understand why she needed to leave for a bit. I can’t comprehend why she left for good. The reasons she gave me simply aren’t valid.
With that out of the way, I’m getting close to not caring why she left for good.
This post isn’t about that. It’s about Twitter. The thing that broke me most last year was when friends of Luria created anonymous twitter accounts, either pretending to be me or just attacking me. They would create an account, follow my Twitter followers and then act like jerks. People got it, but lots of people thought it was me being an ass.
The worst thing they did was use the Neal.TV brand to hurt me. When Luria left, I realized the biggest professional mistake I ever made was putting all my hopes and dreams in her basket. She left and as I began to understand that me not liking John P was costing me everything, I started promoting my work as Neal.TV. I was hurting and broken so I didn’t think to get the nealtv twitter account. I’m nealcampbell online every chance I get to be. A friend or friends of Luria got nealtv on twitter, used my information and a picture of me and then did nasty stuff with it. The worst thing was tweeting insults to speakers at a social media event using a hash-tag that would make whatever nealtv tweeted appear on screen. It was gross and juvenile.
Luria emailed me and said if I apologized to John it would stop. I did because I thought that’s what a Jesus person should do. I also tried to get Twitter to help but they didn’t.
Fastforward a year and I’ve gotten control of the nealtv twitter account. These are the accounts I now control:
There is still one account I know about with a bad picture of me taken by John P. that I don’t control, but that’s pretty much another case of what are you gonna do?
UPDATE: I think I should make the point … I don’t blame Luria for any of this. I think she is a pawn in the game where I don’t like a man I think is bad and that man will do whatever he can to destroy me for not liking him.
Read MoreWhat’s Taking Me So LONG!
Maybe not many, but a few people have wondered where I am and what I’ve been doing in the last few months. I grew up in my grandmother’s house in Arkansas. Last Fall, after the divorce was final, I went home and found her with a black eye. No one was abusing her or anything. She was falling down and landing face first.
You gotta know something about my grandmother. You hear about an older person falling and hurting themselves and the natural emotion is heartache, but for my grandmother? It’s something to laugh about. She’s always got a joke about the latest fall. She’s the kind of person who would say something like, “It’s Fall! So I did!”
A while back, my grandmother’s younger sister (84), who the family calls Aunt Mutt (!?), moved in with my grandmother after being abandoned by her family. Aunt Mutt is in much worse physical shape than my grandmother and she falls all the time too, and does more damage.
Nanny and Mutt joking about their falling all the time helps those of us around them not feel quite so bad, but we wanted to get them into a better situation. My grandmother, in her late 80s, owned a business until last Friday. She didn’t want to give it up, but she knew she wasn’t physically able to do what she needed to do to make it work. The family has encouraged her to sell it for years, but she wasn’t ready to make a change.
Finding her with a big black eye last Fall meant we were dealing with more than just a stubborn old lady or two. I snapped a photo of Nanny’s big black eye on my iPhone and sent it to relatives and decided I would stay with her and Aunt Mutt until we could get them to move to a safer place with loads of family around to love them and take care of them.
In that time, I had an existential crisis and a crisis of faith that I came through okay, but I also picked up old ladies who fell down laughing two or three times a week. I worry that it hurt my career and ability to start something new because I wasn’t making money in the bulk of that time and cost me money I would have been putting into what’s next, but I can’t imagine how I could have made a different choice.
Yesterday, we moved her out of the place she lived for forty years (and the place I grew up). I snapped another picture on my iPhone just before the family drove away and the look on her face gives me pretty good assurance that I did the right thing.
I’ve gotten back to work in a serious way and knowing that my grandmother is in a safe, beautiful new house, surrounded by grandkids and great grandkids frees me up to hopefully do something professionally that I can be proud of too again.
And ummmmm …. here’s a hint …
Thinking Different
I’m not a big fan of conventional thinking. The idea that things have to be a certain way after they’ve always been that way just doesn’t work for me.
In my life, I’ve very rarely taken the road most traveled. Maybe thats bad or maybe it’s good. I don’t think anyone can say for certain as long as my life is still unfolding.
This morning I watched a documentary on Netflix called Future by Design. You know when you see all those da Vinci sketches of things that have come into existence only within the last 100 years? Jacque Fresco is a guy who’s spent his life doing what da Vinci did … imagining the future.
It’s father’s day and I’ve never met my dad. I was raised by my grandfather, but he’s been dead half my life. This is where divorce stuff gets really weird … it’s like I feel like I’m out of place saying good things about Luria’s dad, but with all my heart, I loved that man! He thought different. When Tullio’s dad died, he hand carved a coffin that was so beautiful the Detroit newspaper wanted to photograph it and publish it, but Tullio wouldn’t let them. Tullio was a filmmaker for part of his life and shot a documentary about Buckminster Fuller. He gave me a book about Buckminster Fuller and that was huge to me. For the time I knew him, Tullio was working on creating an entertainment venue that is futuristic even now. I hated that he wasn’t around to see what we did with GeekBrief.TV because he would have loved it and been so proud of his amazing daughter (and his son-in-law).
Divorce is complicated because I love Luria’s family with all my heart, but now they’re out of my life just like she is. It sucks dirt.
Excuse the digression! I loved this documentary because it shows a man evaluating every part of life from transportation to marriage to religion to energy to house construction. Rather than believing we have to do society the way we’ve always done it, he believes we can start fresh and create something that’s never been done or seen.
I hope he’s right!
You can watch the documentary Future by Design for free here.
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