Bunny, Mimi, Kim and I will all be in Las Vegas for our first extended, multi-day Pinky Show meeting. On the agenda is a careful evaluation of what we’ve done since we started this project, and what we’d like to accomplish in the near future and beyond. Our top priority is to create a workable plan that will provide some source of income so that we can work on The Pinky Show full-time (rather that part-time, as we do now). This is important to me because I want to be producing and releasing new episodes a lot more frequently. There’s so many things I want to learn and I only have a short time in order to do it. Before I’m gone I want the episode archives to have hundreds of episodes in it, not just a few dozen.

We chose Las Vegas for our meeting (instead of just staying at home) because we thought the unfamiliar surroundings might give us a different perspective. That and also we need some video and pictures for an episode we’re working on about internal colonies. So we’ll do some running around with cameras and tripods and such while we’re there too.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that we’ll be ‘out of the office’ next week (I’ve always wanted to say that) just in case you write us an e-mail and it takes us longer than usual to reply. Everyone please take care.

~ pinky

We just returned from Las Vegas yesterday. All in all I think we got a lot done. Although it was only a week long and Las Vegas really isn’t so far away, by the time we got back we were all very, very tired - so tired that I feel like I should only be using short sentences to record my thoughts. Some people have been asking for a summary of what we did on our trip so here it is.

Sunday evening, June 10. Start walking to Las Vegas.

Tuesday morning, June 12. By the time we get to Las Vegas we’re so tired we decide to rearrange our schedule and do ‘nothing’ the first day. We had planned to give ourselves Friday off but instead I’m out-voted 3-1 and we immediately use the first half of our play-day to nap and recover from the long walk (100 miles). After napping we rent cat bicycles (tricycle for Kim) for the afternoon and ride out to Red Rock Canyon, right outside Las Vegas. Our plan was find some nice shade and just sit around and admire the scenery, but when we got there it looked like everything was recently burned (desert fire? no shade at all) so basically we just had to keep on moving.

<-- click on thumbnails for larger pictures.

I had to take a picture of this - these mountain-sized rocks are at the Calico Basin at Red Rock. To me they looked like giant, sleeping cats.

Okay, maybe not so much in the photograph, but they did in person.

Anyway, by the time we got back to the city it was pretty late. We returned the bicycles and met up with two of our human being friends at their hotel in Downtown Las Vegas. They gave us food and let us sleep in their hotel room every night for the remainder of our trip. We didn’t have a meeting that first night, we just went to sleep.

Wednesday, June 13. This was our first day of work. In the daytime we went to the Atomic Testing Museum for ‘information gathering’, from 9 a.m. when it opened until 5 p.m. when it closed. We took a short break for lunch (Himalayan food - loooks and tastes like Indian food to me). From about 6 p.m. till about 2 a.m. we had the first of several Pinky Show meetings. The meeting went long so we went to bed without dinner.

The Atomic Testing Museum.

Thursday, June 14. Daytime was spent doing more information gathering. We went to the Nevada Test Site - home to about a 1,000 nuclear detonations and probably the most bombed place on Earth. While we were there we had a run-in with ’security’ (with all their SUVs and guns and body armor) that was really an adventure in and of itself - but I guess that’s a story for another day.

One of many warning signs at the entrance to NTS.

Thursday afternoon & evening: more meetings. Dinner was Las Vegas ‘buffet food’. Between the two of them I think Kim and Mimi probably ate about a thousand shrimps. I have no idea how so much shrimp can fit in such a tiny cat (Kim). Buffets are a terrible idea.

Friday, June 15. More photography and note gathering at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire. These places are beautiful. And hot! The heat kept on making our camera shut down.

The water of Lake Mead is so blue it glows.

Lots of bright orange-red rocks at Valley of Fire.

Like the previous two days, we have a long meeting from late afternoon to about 3 a.m. Dinner is Chinese food. I’m still trying to avoid eating animals so I ate mushroom-noodles & pea sprouts while the others ate fish.

Saturday, June 16. Two more of our human being advisor-friends arrive in Las Vegas and we all have another meeting together. I have a baked potato for lunch. We break at 5 p.m. and attend a friend’s wedding held in the backyard of a house on Torrey Pines Drive. It’s a small wedding - 22 people and 4 cats. We have lots of fun and leave around midnight.

Sunday, June 17. Another full day of meetings, starting from the morning and ending at 10 p.m. We get dinner food from a Whole Foods Market. I have never heard of Whole Foods Market but apparently they are popping up everywhere. I don’t know if the food was healthier than what we usually eat but it didn’t taste good.

Monday, June 18. One last day of meetings. This meeting and the previous one centers on matters of financing The Pinky Show. On one hand I do realize that talking and planning about money is essential if we’re going to be able to continue working on The Pinky Show. But personally I’d rather spend my time thinking about matters of history, culture, politics, and stuff like that, so basically these meetings feel like some form of mild torture. Regardless, by the time we say good-bye to our human being friends I feel like we’ve made some progress in terms of deciding on some of the things that need to be done in the immediate-future. We all wave good-bye to each other and they go catch their various airplanes to go back to where they came from. The sun goes down and we start our walk back home.

Tuesday, June 19. Arrive back home.

Wow, I was also going to talk about what we discussed in our meetings but this diary entry is already so long and I’m sure you’re already bored by now. So I think I’ll continue on tomorrow. Sorry.

~ pinky

A week of meetings generates quite a lot of minutes. I did take notes but it’s not a verbatim transcript per se, so my apologies to everyone if this summary contains inaccuracies or misinterpretations of what was actually said.

Looking Back: The First Two Years.

• All of us agree that working on the Pinky Show project has been a good learning experience for us. It’s really pushed us to learn how to do things we never would have otherwise attempted (none of us actually enjoy working with computers) - for example, we’ve had to learn how to: build and run a web site; record sound and music on a computer; draw cats; edit video; make t-shirts; and so on.

• It’s kind of amazing to us how much of the time we’ve spent during the first two years has been just trying to learn how to do all the technical stuff necessary to produce the Pinky Show. It may not always be apparent to viewers, but in every episode we usually try to experiment a little in order to improve on at least a couple of things. As we get more comfortable with the ‘production’ side of things, we’ll be able to make new episodes faster and more efficiently.

• The most rewarding thing about working on this project however has been the ‘non-technical’ aspects: doing research; drafting and editing scripts; searching for or creating illustrations; talking to all kinds of knowledgeable people. It’s really been the kind of ‘education’ we were looking for.

• We all agree that the best part about making The Pinky Show has actually turned out to be the part that no one else gets to see. After we do our preliminary research (’information gathering’), we all sit down and start discussing how we should present the information. We argue about the implications of presenting this way and that way. We map out all the ways we imagine what we say could possibly be interpreted by different audiences (and the logical consequences of each). It probably doesn’t look like it when people see the final result, but behind the scenes we actually do a lot of fighting (and yelling and biting and scratching) about what matters and why. We have a lot of arguments about wording. Each discussion inevitably sends us back to do more research; we repeat this until we feel like we can make an episode that has what we call ‘instrumentality’. Ultimately we make decisions based on whether or not something will make an episode more useful as a political weapon. Even if it’s a very small weapon. Anyway, the working process we’ve developed is not a methodology per se and it’s certainly not efficient. But it’s been the most enjoyable part and being able to slug it out on a daily basis is having a profound effect on all of us.

• Our episodes have slowly (technically) improved. One day we’d like to re-do some of our earlier episodes (version 2.0), especially the Columbian Exposition one and the Vietnam War episode.

• We’ve experimented with different formats for presenting information and will continue to do this using formats we haven’t tried yet - for example: music videos, slide shows, tutorials, street interviews, and so on.

• Our favorite episode type so far is the ones where we start out with a ’simple’ question and do the research in order to try to find an answer - for example, the Vietnam War episode, the Iraq War episode, etc. Unfortunately episodes like these also take the longest to produce and so they are also the most expensive to produce. Runner-up is we like the merging of travel diary with research, such as in the Columbian Exposition episode. We like this format but of course these also tend to be expensive because of the additional costs associated with travel. We like interview-based episodes and they are much faster (and therefore cost less) to make, but since they are telephone interviews we think maybe it is visually a little boring. In the future, whenever possible, we would like to do some in-person interviews.

[ Bunny’s note: If we do in-person interviews that also adds travel costs because we’re in the fucking desert. ]

• Originially we had intended the Pinky Show to be a very short-form program (approx. 3 to 5 minutes per episode), with a new episode released every few days. Although we still like the concept, we quickly found out that that format didn’t really suit our personality-types. We tend to like to be very careful in our research (which takes a lot of time) and also we tend to like to look at the relationships between things (which also tends to be not-so-easy to explain). All of these things made our episodes longer and longer and basically we have really struggled to keep our episodes short and ‘tight’ rather than go on and on in a discursive fashion. We always joke that pretty soon we’ll be making 2-hour documentaries, then after that 10-hour, 5 part mini-series.

• Most of our episodes thus far have centered on pretty dark subject matter. This was not our original intention but considering the current state of world affairs (and the fact that with the exception of Kim we are basically a serious bunch), we’re not surprised it’s gone this way.

• Mimi & Kim originally intended to be more actively involved in research and writing. However for various reasons this hasn’t really happened (yet) and Mimi’s PS work has mostly been limited to financial and organizational paperwork and some grant writing. We wouldn’t have been able to continue work on the Pinky Show, however, if it weren’t for Mimi & Kim’s outside work and financial contributions that have allowed us to pay for equipment, bills, and all our other expenses. Hopefully in the near future they will be able to be more directly involved in creating content.

• Bunny & I have also had to spend lots of hours away from Pinky Show work in order to take on (paying) outside projects. Based on our calculations we would have been able to produce at least 50% more episodes over the last year if we were able to dedicate all our time towards the Pinky Show.

• The relatively large number of international viewers has been an unexpected but nice surprise. The question has arisen about whether or not we should provide translations (subtitles) in other languages.

• Viewer feedback has (generally) been far more positive than we had anticipated. Which is nice, but it makes us wonder if people are really understanding the implications of what we are saying.

• Lack of funding continues to be our largest problem.

Okay, just like yesterday, this entry turned out to be really long. So I’m going to stop right here and tomorrow I’ll conclude my report by summarizing some of the stuff we discussed that relates to what our plans are for the future. Hugs to everybody.

~ pinky

Although we weren’t able to resolve every single issue that needed addressing on our agenda, we did decide on how to proceed on quite a few things. This is a very condensed version of some of the conclusions reached during our meeting - all subject to change of course!

Looking Forward: The Upcoming Year

• What are some of the upcoming episodes that we want to do in the near future? Well, the biggest elephant in the room for us is colonialism (i.e., Native/Settler relations), both throughout history and right now. We’ll finally have a chance to touch on that in our upcoming ‘What is an internal colony?’ episode. Also in line for upcoming episodes (hopefully) are analyses of popular culture. We really like art, music, movies, etc., but we really haven’t talked about any of this stuff yet in any of our episodes.

• Translations & Subtitles: We’ve received a few e-mails from people outside the U.S. who have requested subtitles - especially in Spanish and German. Although we all agree that it’d be great to have The Pinky Show translated into these and other languages, we have a few constraints. First, none of us know how to speak either of these languages. The second issue is one of time. We only have a two-cat production crew to do the job of making new episodes (our top priority) and running most of our day-to-day operations, and I feel like we are already stretched pretty thin. Bunny has an idea though - she really likes anime (Japanese animation) and says that the way a lot of anime is subtitled into other languages is a good model for how The Pinky Show could also be done. These translated episodes are called ‘fan-subs’ and basically the subtitles are created by viewers of the episodes who can speak both the source and target languages (bilingual). The producers of the episodes themselves are usually not involved at all. Sometimes the viewers who do the translations meet and coordinate on a website dedicated to creating the subtitles (essentially a ‘translation wiki’). It’s not like we’re lazy or don’t want to be supportive, but politically speaking we think it’s important to maintain a certain amount of ‘distance’ between ourselves and the finished subtitled episodes simply because we can’t vouch for the accuracy of subtitles we can’t read. If viewers understand they are reading subtitles generated by other viewers rather than our production team, we think this will go a long way toward dissipating a fair amount of false assumptions and misunderstandings before they arise.

• The $$$ Situation: So far we have been trying to fund the PS through grants and donations. We also have recently opened a Pinky Show online store. The short story is that none of these have shown much promise in terms of funding our project, at least for the time being. So far no one has shown any interest in funding the PS through grants. Our site traffic continues to go up every month and we receive lots of encouraging e-mails, but besides a tiny handful of individuals (thank you to those people!) we have also not been receiving any donations. So far we have sold maybe 3 posters, 3 shirts, and a Pinky doll from the store. So instead, practically all of our ‘funding’ has come from our outside work - building websites, photography, design stuff, etc. But according to bookkeeper Mimi we haven’t hit equilibrium - with our current ratio of outside work to Pinky Show work, every month we continue like this we accumulate more debt (apparently we’ve been spending too much time working on Pinky Show stuff, and not enough time making money doing outside jobs). So until we start getting grants and donations, we need to be more disciplined and only work on producing new episodes after we’ve raised the money to pay for their production. If we don’t do this our debt is only going to get bigger and sooner or later we’re going to starve. Not good.

• Mimi doesn’t think donations are ever going to be a good way to sustain The Pinky Show. She basically thinks that even if people like watching our episodes, people are ‘cheap’. I’m not sure if that’s true or not but I also think that we don’t have nearly enough traffic at our site to receive a significant amount of donations. I’m guessing only a tiny fraction of people actually make donations. So I think we need thousands and thousands of people visiting our site every day just to have a chance to receive a decent amount of donations. For this reason I think we need to focus on attracting lots more viewers to our website. We have to build relationships with larger, more well-established progressive organizations in order for this to happen. Examples of this kind of relationship building include having our videos (or at least links to our videos) prominently placed on high-traffic websites, co-producing episodes that other organizations can immediately put to educational use with their membership/audiences, and so on. Bunny and I will try to do a little of this kind of work every week, but I think this falls under the category of ‘long-term’ development work. It’s kind of amazing (ridiculous?) that we’ve actually never done any PR or marketing-type work the whole time since we started. No wonder no one knows we exist… o.O

• Mimi brought up the question of whether or not we want to (re)consider the possibility of 1) doing an iTunes style buy-our-episode-for-$1.00 type of thing; or 2) making our website only accessible via some kind of subscription thing; or 3) accepting advertisements as possible ways of generating income. I vetoed all of the above. I see these as last-last-last resort kind of options and anyway I highly doubt they’d work. I don’t think people feel like learning from cats is something they’d be willing to pay for; I don’t want money to be a barrier (even a symbolic one) to poor people accessing the content we produce; and we don’t have enough traffic to interest advertisers (not to mention Bunny and I hate advertisements…). No.

• Mimi will continue to pursue grants whenever possible. I’ll help her with the writing. To be realistic though, it may take us a long time to figure out how to get grants. Neither of us are experienced in grantsmanship.

• One of the things that I’m pretty good at is making things. So we decided that Bunny and I will try to raise some money by making and selling more t-shirts. We’re going to make a few more designs and then try selling them on eBay and stuff like that as a fundraiser. I doubt we’ll make a lot of money this way but at least we already know how to make t-shirts and it’s the kind of thing that can bring in some income right away (I hope), instead of months or years from now.

• I also got some unexpected encouragement from the others to try to write and illustrate children’s books. At first I was like ‘Yuck, I don’t even like human being children…’. But Mimi made the important point that they don’t really have to be for children at all, that children’s books is really only a format - very simple text and lots of pictures. So basically I can make children’s books for adults. This idea I like. So I will be trying that. I have to look into how we’d be able to economically print out the books - there’s no sense in making a lovely children’s book that costs $80 each. Mimi suggested e-books, and while that’s a viable option, in the end we decided that if we can find a way to print out a physical book for a reasonable cost then we’d prefer to have something people can hold in their hands.

• One of the main set of questions that needed answering before closing our week-long series of meetings: What will we do if we can’t find a way to have The Pinky Show financially sustain itself? How much longer can we continue before pulling the plug on this project? We all had slightly different answers. Mimi and Kim have promised to keep on helping for at least another year. But they do have other commitments and I’m sure it’s been hard for them knowing that they’ve directed a lot of their hard earned money to this project and yet we’re still struggling. Bunny said she’d be willing to keep on working on the Pinky Show until she dies, even if financial constraints force her to treat it as just a part-time thing. I feel like I want to work on this until I die too, but I see this as being primarily an educational/political project rather than a hobby, and as such I feel like this project has to be of a certain scale in order for it to make sense. If I can’t somehow find a way to eventually produce an episode a week (my dream output), I think maybe I could be more useful doing something else. I’ll wait until next year’s meeting to see how I feel about it then. Until then I’m going to keep working on this as if our little project is guaranteed to find support.

I’m sure I’m forgetting lots of things (I didn’t take notes the entire time) so Bunny, Mimi, Kim - please feel free to add whatever you like to these notes.

Postscript:

• Tuesday, June 19: Upon arriving back from our trip, I find an e-mail in my mailbox notifying us that we have been rejected for another big grant we had applied for. Sad!

• Wednesday, June 21: We receive an e-mail from a curator of an upcoming exhibition on radical education at a museum in Slovenia, asking us if we’d be interested in participating. Yes we would! Happy!

So goes our roller coaster ride here in our lonely corner of the Mojave desert.

~ pinky