Quest for Pie and Internet Growing Pains

I am so insanely full of Dutch Apple Pie right now, and it is a marvelous feeling indeed. Before our class this morning, a few of us decided that we needed to partake in this particular pie while we were in town and thought that for lunch, we’d just pop around the corner where they had “Dutch apple pie” advertised in the window. However, as we were gathering ourselves outside the IES building, Marc Van Woudenberg from Xolo.tv, who spoke to our class about the personal publishing revolution, shook his head and drew a dot on Jenny’s map on the opposite side of the city. “That’s where you need to go if you want Dutch Apple Pie.”

Thus began our quest for pie.
I ended up singing, to the tune of “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, of course, “This is My Quest / For Dutch Apple Pie// We may never find it/ But dammit, we’ll try!”

There was more to the song, but I’ll spare you. Anyway, after much traipsing through some very pretty parts of Amsterdam, we came upon a little café called Winkel by Noorder Markt, and we sat out among the pidgeons and ate amazingly delicious apple pie with loads of whipped cream and a cold glass of milk. It was marvelous. When I get the pictures from Caitlin, I’ll pop them up. It promises to be adorable.
We’ve had a really wonderful last couple of days. Yesterday, we went to visit the Waag Society, a new media organization that meets in this castle and does a lot of really cool media stuff.One project that I thought sounded really fun was Frequency 1550, a mobile phone based scavenger hunt designed for a high school history class. As the students navigated through Amsterdam, they could see their progress overlaid on a medieval map, and were given tasks and challenges to do at different sites of historical significance. The student’s journey was based on a religious miracle that made Amsterdam a pilgrimage site in the 1500s. As I understand it, a priest was giving a man his last rites, but as he was dying, he vomited up the wafer. The priest then threw the vomit into the fire, as was customary at the time and low and behold, the host would not burn. So the Miraculous Vomited Communion Wafer that Would Not Burn was put in a box and brought to the local church, and there were many magnificent Processions in its honor. And, with the support and ingenuity of the Waag, students can process around, too. And learn!


Our group also got the chance to do short projects inspired by the Waag, and people did some very cool things. Jeremy and Joe made a silent movie, ; Sarah recreated the building with elements from pictures she took in the area surrounding it (much cooler to look at than for me to describe) and a group of us recreated Rembrandt’s painting “The Anatomy Lesson,” which was sketched and displayed in the building. John was the Doctor dissecting a computer. Terin was Hunchy, Susan was Redheady, Stacey was Stretchy, August was Lanky "TotallyNotPayingAttentiony" was none other than renowned vlogger Bicyclemark. I called my guy "Nauseous."


Today, as I alluded to in the pie anecdote, Marc from Xolo.tv dropped in to speak to us about personal publishing. As I'm sure you're unaware of from reading this ever-so-professional weblog, I'm very new to the world of self-published digital media, but I'm working on it. I'm actually pretty fascinated/repulsed/confused/excited by this crazy series of tubes, especially as a fledgling producer of independent media. I literally did a happy dance when I made the DVDfest zombie movie available for podcast. Talking with the vloggers today definitely inspired me to at least try to make quality, interesting stuff and put it out there. We're on the verge of a new era, and sure, the internet is still in its "fart jokes, people falling off of stuff, and cat puns" phase, but I do believe it has the potential to be something vibrant and beautiful and creative. *sigh*

Or maybe that's just the pie talking.

Also, in my attempts to understand who the heck is actually looking at this, would you (yes, you) mind leaving a comment? Just say how you found this, or where you're from, or whatever. It's just nice to know people are listening.