The Amazing Metaphysical Travelling Map

It is to be, Shirtware T-Shirt Three-of-Three..

Codename: tamtm, aka. "The Map"
Incept date: 01-10-1998
Designs: 2079

And I STILL can't decide which one to use. The concept is more important than the design, you see. But here I am, with my deadline, and only two shirts done. He noblest lives, and all that..

The Amazing Metaphysical Travelling Map

I always knew it was meant for sharing, but pinning it down has been more than a challenge; it has proved near impossible. The Thing refuses to sit still, accepts all paths, all manner of correct design interpretations. I'm gonna have to just decide, and be done with it, for now. Och well. that's fine, too.

Never be lost again! .. With The Amazing Metaphysical Travelling Map.

You know that feeling you get when you come up with a string of words or an idea that is so simple and yet so complete; the deep satisfaction that comes from capturing some of the Universe's wiring in a such a lowly container. And so it was with The Map. I started with a simple version in my wallet, and a poster on my wall, and things started to happen.

I stopped getting so lost. And the poster version got noticed. People wanted a copy for themselves, and so I worked up a colour version, with a fancy fractal background. I still have the old Quark and ClarisDraw files from my now long-dead Mac. It served the purpose well enough back in the days when a printer was more important, but I wasn't entirely happy with the funky-fractal version. As one commenter said, "I prefer the plain one".

For T-Shirts, too, a plain version would be ideal, something I can produce in vectors, slap onto any old thing; T-Shirts, posters, wallet-cards, and all the rest. Punt out enough of these to finance in-house production, and that's Phase Three of the .org underway. As a canny business advisor once told me, "A vision is not a Plan", but I have plans, too, you see.

So I move the vision forward anyway, unshaken by the staggering evidence that my belief in the idea that if I saved a million people each a man-hour, they would; even one percent of them; donate me back a man-hour's worth of cash, is false. If this were true, my Voyager router pages would have made me a millionaire, which they did not. Fortunately, that's not why I did them.

So now I'm working on the belief that you all wear clothes, at least some of the time, are generally honest, and also know a good deal when you spot it. Belief is useful like that, you just believe in a thing, and off you go. It may turn out to be a completely faulty notion, but I'll cross that bridge if and when I get to it.

Without belief, you can't really do things 100%, I feel, so I've created Shirtware, and a way for you to pay for something I've chosen to give away for free; software being the first shirtware item, though I see no reason not to release music and other virtual things this way, but not today. Today I'm putting checksum out for public beta.

So like a chef, I have all these ingredients timed, coding, software release, documentation, how-to pages, references, shop creation, designs, t-shirts, and so on. And The Map is undercooked. The irony is, it's been on the cooker longer than everything else! Oh, here it is, at least, the current "near-as-dammit" blue-print version..



The concept can also be expressed as plain text..

[the past]--------------[ NOW ]--------------[the future]
           you are here __/

You get the idea.

But until I can settle on a design, you don't get the T-Shirt, baseball cap, hoodie-top, and so on; and if I am to make a living from giving away stuff for free, this is clearly a problem. This is the shirt you want. But probably not the full-colour funky-fractal version..

Which is fine for a credit-card-sized map, for keeping you on the path, when you're out and about, which I call "wallet-cards", for some reason.

The Amazing Metaphysical Travelling Map page is also, as yet, woefully undercooked. Blogging-as-step-towards-actually-doing-it, it's an interesting idea. Like the creators of those zany Post-it's you occasionally see on fridges; I'll try anything!

it's close, but not quite. "The Past" would probably be more like..



And I'd likely construct it from a shape like this..



And perhaps "The Future" would be more flare-like, have a definite shape, like maybe..



Though I still enjoy the straight-up-and-down, more original designs, like this..

AARRGGHHHH!!!!

You can see the fun I'm having.

But simply hitting "publish" in the corzblog add page can have a profound effect on things, so I'm just gonna do that now, and see what happens to my psyche.

If this works, I may start blogging about songs, drop oodles of mp3s. I have one right now that likes to be done at least three completely different ways, and is giving me no end of grief wrestling with it.

Another day.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org