I got through the first four daily assignments without too much difficultly. Now, with the fifth, I find myself just staring into a blank P5.JS page. It’s one thing to develop an application to spec when the details have been spelled out for you. It’s something altogether other to conceive of and develop something on your own.

I know that this is just an example of using the JavaScript object prototype to throw a large number of somethings onto the screen. It’s the defining of what those ‘somethings’ are that seems to be a blocking factor for me. Scott said that it could be triangles—just no balls. I just want to do something more than simply substituting one shape for another. I want to create something cool.

I’m just staring at a blank page.

I went to the Internet and found several P5 examples exhibiting a certain ‘wow’ factor. I dug into a few of these and thought “well, I could do something like this!” But in the end, it really wouldn’t be my creation; it would just be a derivation of something someone else spent time developing. Last week, I saw Nathaniel’s daily; he has shit falling down the screen. Shit! And it’s actually cool. I find that I can’t even draw shit.

I’m still staring at a fucking empty screen wanting to do something “cool” and I can’t get off square one.

Here’s an idea . . . a large cube that can be rotated along all three of its axis. Ok—but what’s on the surface of each of the cube’s sides? Just color? Too boring. Images? Ok—that’s more creative. Here’s one example from the P5 website.

Here’s what I really want: a movie cube. A cube linked to specific lines from Shakespeare’s plays. You have a webpage that displays the text from a particular play, and at certain defined points along the text you can pull up the cube that will have several movies loaded to those specific lines from the play. I want a Macbeth cube. I turn to Act 5, scene 5—the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech. On one side of the cube is the 1948 Orson Welles’s Macbeth loaded to that specific point in the text. I turn the cube and there’s the Roman Polanski 1971 version. Same lines. Twisting the cube again, and I get the latest Justin Kurzel Macbeth production—again just those lines. Then the BBC TV version and so forth.

The Possibilities! I need a web page with the text. I need to tag the text. I need a database to hold the movie clips. I need to clip or tag the movies for specific points. Now it comes down the technical aspects, copyrights, and time. Would this even be worth doing? And, to what end?

I echo Todd when he says, “I sit and stare at Atom, like Jack Torrance at his typewriter, thinking, ‘Oh, you evil motherfucker…’”