Digital Hate Machine

As some of you know, prior to last summer I was a youth leader within a local Christian church. You can read some of my “falling out” writing here and here (I should really write more about that, I’ve come a long way). For an end of semester activity bringing together a few different small groups, I organized a photo scavenger hunt. It was a 70’s Dress-Up photo scavenger hunt, at the urging of some people for whom it would be safe to presume, were female. After the 90 minutes each small group was allotted to collect as many photographs from the list I came up with as possible, we all gathered back together in a big room at the church for pizza, socializing and finally the much-anticipated turn for each group to upload its photos to a laptop and present them to the larger group from the stage via projector.

Here are some hits from the photo scavenger hunt list:

• Photo of a teammate male dressed as a female going on a date with a teammate female dressed as a male. (40pts) (I was an edgy leader!)

• A photo of team members eating fast food in a sit-down restaurant. (25pts)

• A photo of team members being chased by at least 4 strangers (20pts) *Bonus for 6+ (15) Bonus for 10+ (30pts)*

• Photograph of a foot-long shaved strip of skin on a male teammate’s leg. (28pts)

• Photo of a team mate holding a baby (25pts) *Bonus for 2+ (25pts), multiplied to the nth baby being held (without risking the well being of the babies).* (edgy!)

• A photo of a stranger taking a photo of your team (25pts)

• A photo of stranger taking a photo of a stranger taking a photo of your team (30pts) *Bonus points for iterations to the nth (x30pts)*

I’m actually very proud of the list – apart from these crueler examples, there were many photo requests that provided ample opportunity for creativity, that would be a lot of fun to figure out with a group of friends. But that’s not what this blog is about, so our story continues…

The time had come for my small group to present our photographs. We’d used my camera, and I was well aware that in addition to the spoils of our scavenger hunt within it, there were also hundreds of photos of toys to be found. See, we had just finished a huge project at work about small-scale toy properties for boys. Basically, we were looking into the idea of a property/story/world/characters that would sell 2inch plastic figurines to boys.

It’s a large market, and until we knew exactly what made some of these IPs (intellectual properties) work with the intended product, and what led some of these toy lines to failure, the executives would be unsure about investing in the project. So, we dropped $300 bucks at Toys ‘r’ Us and brought back to the office examples from every line of this type of toy. We proceeded to analyze the most and least successful toys and develop guidelines for creating a property that worked with the toys. Super easy example: muscles, guns and superheroes were all successful, normally-proportioned characters were not, unless the property behind them was very well-known, and even then they sold less than the well-known guns and muscles characters. It was comprehensive.

I was also well aware that within this collection of toy images there lurked some…inappropriate pictures of these beloved characters. See, I had built a nice, well-lit stage in which to shoot the profiles of each figure being analyzed in our presentation and, as could only be expected from a team of nerdy entertainment writers like us when asked to do something like this, it struck me how, when positioned…strategically and shot at the right angles one could photographically communicate that…well, that Spider-Man had special…feelings for his cartoon friends.

But this was not a problem, I knew the pictures were in there and that knowledge gave me power over them. Power, and a neurotic paranoia about keeping them secret. I went to upload the photos and started by highlighting everything in my camera and copying it into a folder on my desktop. Then, I deleted everything on the camera and sorted all the pictures in the new file by “last modified”. This would bring all of tonight’s pictures to the bottom of the file where I could easily highlight them, drag them into the scavenger hunt file I had created earlier on my desktop, and safely share my group’s wholesome photos with the larger audience of about 50 students involved in our small group ministry.

Well, something went wrong. About 10 photos in, following a lovely picture of our group enjoying McDonald’s burgers inside a sit-down sushi restaurant, I heard several gasps and the immediate, hysterical laughter of two friends in the room with whom I’d shared the “other” photos. I turned around to face the projector positioned behind the stage.

Holy. Effing. Ess (in church). My heart stopped. Gary, one of the “in the know-ers”, had fallen from his chair and was pounding the floor, literally about to die from laughter. I couldn’t move. Then more gasps.

Oh my precious ex-lord, it was on slideshow mode. The fairly conservative girl operating the laptop had pushed away from it, both out of shock and to avoid association with the abomination unfolding before her. I rushed the projector, the idea of managing my reaction to play the whole thing down was nowhere in my mind. Waving my hands about in an entirely futile attempt to obscure the image, I closed on the projector, and as I began to fumble with it, searching for some way to end this nightmare (like perhaps, an off switch), the final piece of horror projects onto my almost unbelievably convenient white t-shirt. Suddenly, like some demonic Cafe Press creation, this is on my chest:

And people ask why I left the church.

The entire disaster was so surreal, I knew immediately both that what was occurring was horrible, that I would have preferred it not happened, and still that it was so phenomenal I should really savor it, see it as special. Like if you witnessed the rare meteorological phenomenon called ball lightning, watched it drift down from the heavens like it performs according to the very few eyewitness accounts and some theoretical modeling, but then the ball lightning fried off the lower half of your non-dominant arm. Yeah, it’s fucking terrible, but you get to explain the encounter to scientists and reporters and be on Oprah to talk about it.

Except in my case my “arm” got better over time.

I explained, over a serious amount of giggling and some outright hooting, as I explained above, until conservative laptop operator girl stepped in to demand a little order in the place. Normally, I’m quite the taker of charge, but I guess a good photograph of Mace Windu jamming his telltale purple lightsaber into the crotch of a toddler projected onto your chest can really soften one’s control over a room.

-Jake.