Helen Chick
55. Waiting
A single image,
And a tag
With just three words,
Provoking puzzlement.
Time passed
The image changed;
Replaced still later
By a third,
And then a fourth.
And so for days
Changing hourly:
Story unfolding
Of stick figures
Building sandcastles
Threatened by
A rising tide.
The images faded
The end was feared
But then, revived.
A journey started
And image after image
Showed the course of
An expedition
To explore the
Monochrome world:
Past weird trees,
Climbing mountains,
Searching for rivers,
Encountering
Half-hidden creatures
In a strangely
Haunted alien
Familiar landscape.
Hour by hour
Frame by frame
In stop motion
For eighty days.
And still it continues,
Still it provokes
Puzzled perplexity.
Its meaning a mystery;
Duration unknown;
Purpose uncertain.
There is no choice
But to follow
The advice on the
Unchanging tag and
“Wait for it”.
13 June 2013
Comments: This one is in reference to a comic — well, more than a comic — called “Time”. Watching it has been a bizarre experience. It started on March 25 and is still running. Randall Munroe does the xkcd comics, which often have a mathsy geeky bent and often appeal to my sense of humour. He has done some fascinating comics — some involving a great deal of research and others very creative (e.g., “Click and Drag“, which had a whole black and white world that you could explore by clicking and dragging on the frame). If you go to the “Time” comic right now you will only see the most recently released frame (and if you hover your pointer on the comic frame you will see the “alt-text” tag in a little yellow box that says “Wait for it”), but all the previous frames have been collected and assembled into a “movie” that you can click through (see here: xkcd.aubronwood.com; be advised that there are now — as at 25 June — over 2300 frames, and so clicking through it even at 2 frames per second will take you 20 minutes, so be advised; alternatively you can try http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ which runs an animation of the whole sequence, stopping on significant frames, or you could try http://xkcd.mscha.org/viewer/1 which includes an index to the major sections). A whole community of people are following the evolution of the story on an online discussion forum, often in very creative ways (this is where I learned about double dactyls, but I had to go cold turkey from the forum because following the discussions — fascinating though they were — was eating too much of my time). Despite 2300 images, no one knows where the story is headed or what it all means. Currently (25/6/2013) it is still being produced, with a new frame every hour, and we do not yet appear to be nearing the conclusion. So, we just continue to “wait for it”.
Update 29 July 2013: “Time” finished about 3 days ago, after about 3100 images. The denizens of the forum — many of whom had read all of the the nearly 52000 posts in the thread and some had made substantial contributions to this total — have been lamenting its ending. However, they have also been reflecting on the shared experiences they had as they made creative contributions, deciphered — from the movement of the stars — that the story was set 11000 years in the future, attempted to translate a new language, developed their own catchphrases, and suddenly learned that a dried up Mediterranean was being flooded again. Many found it a curiously affirming experience.
Themes to come: 56. Danger Ahead; 57. Sacrifice; 58. Kick in the Head; 59. No Way Out; 60. Rejection
Explanation about the 100 poems challenge here.
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