To anyone who is familiar with LoadingReadyRun, we have announced a project recently that ties into our upcoming office move. Since the ability (and necessity) to move to a new, larger and better equipped office is in large part due to the amazing generosity of our Patreon supporters, we wanted to say thank you by recognizing them on what we are calling the “Load-bearing Gratitude Wall”. We decided that anyone who, by February 2015, has supported us for a total of $150 during the Patreon will be included on the wall. I like the idea of looking at the total Patreon contribution because it rewards people who have been consistently supporting us instead of asking for a one-time “buy a brick”-style donation.

The small problem that we have run into  is that it turns out that Patreon doesn’t have an easy way for people to see how much they have already contributed. You have to actually go to your contribution history page and just manually add up all the amounts.  Whenever there is something repetitive to do online (particularly involving math), I immediately think about how to automate it. To that end, I have written a little javascript bookmarklet that you can activate to automatically give you the total you have pledged to each Patreon campaign.

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link:

Patreon Pledge Totals

to your bookmark bar.

Or if you are on an iOS device, make a new bookmark and then edit it and replace the url with the bookmarklet code below

javascript:(function(){var page = $('body').html(), re = /You pledged \$([0-9.]+)\s+to (.+) for/g,totals = {},out = ''; while ((myArray = re.exec(page)) !== null) { if(typeof totals[myArray[2]] == 'undefined'){ totals[myArray[2]] = Number(myArray[1]); } else { totals[myArray[2]] += Number(myArray[1]); } } for (user in totals){ out += user+': $'+totals[user]+'<br/>'; } $('<div />').attr('style','width:200px;position:fixed;top:50px;left:50px;background-color:white;border:black 1px solid').html(out).appendTo('body')})();

Then go to your Completed Pledges Page and click the bookmarklet. You should see a box appear int he top left corner of the window with all the campaigns you have contributed to and how much to have pledged to date.

Note: Obviously you have to login to your Patreon account to get to the Completed Pledges page. This bookmarklet does not access your personal information in any way. It just adds up all the numbers that are already on the page.

If you are interested to see a more readable version of the code, check it out after the jump: Continued reading >

A few years ago now, the MOMA in New York held a retrospective of work by renowned performance artist, Marina Abramović. As part of this exhibit, Abramović performed a piece called The Artist is Present, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. As luck would have it, PAX East 2010 was happening at the same time and after the convention, myself and several others of the LRR Crew took an extra week to visit New York and we went to the MOMA as part of our vacation. I didn’t get to sit with Abramović during that visit, as even at that point the line was several hours long, but I found the concept fascinating and was moved even just watching from the sidelines. What I find particularly interesting is the subtle emotions that can be communicated without speech or even movement when you are really concentrating on another person.

I feel that I have a somewhat unique perspective on this particular performance because of a project I did a year before the MOMA exhibit, called ThingsOnMyHead. Strange as it seems, this project consisted of a bunch of short videos where I silently looked into the camera while balancing objects on my head. It was supposed to just be a couple of silly shorts to make fun of the concept of pointless YouTube “viral videos”, but the first few got such interesting feedback that I decided to continue making them. In the realm of Internet comments, YouTube is often considered to be the bottom of the barrel, a cesspool of illiterate, offensive and insulting garbage, but for whatever reason, these videos of me just silently looking into the camera for a minute and a half seemed to affect people. The comments were not only almost universally positive, but many people would often “play along” with the concept and cite their favourite section or compare one almost identical video to the previous one. I ended up making over 80 of the ThingsOnMyHead videos, and they have been watched over 1.5 million times. The YouTube channel has over 17,000 subscribers and still gets comments.

A couple of months ago, I came across Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, a documentary about the MOMA retrospective and Abramović herself, which rekindled my interest in her work. I kept thinking about the way The Artist is Present affected the people who participated and comparing it to my own experiences interacting with the public through LoadingReadyRun and with ThingsOnMyHead. Finally, I have decided to stop just thinking about and to attempt my own project, inspired by The Artist is Present: The Streamer is Online.

Click here for more information on how the project works and how to participate yourself.