An actor has got it easy: on the stage, he has to be on for, at most, 3 hours or so (stretch it to three and a half if we're talking Eugene O'Neill) and intervals of about 5-25 minutes if he's a movie actor. But having a webcam trace your every single nose pick, ass scratch and yawn for 24 hours a day, now that's a challenge that Tom Hanks couldn't even surmount.

Can you imagine your every single move published en vivo to the entire world? In fact, I almost gave Mission Support a heart attack a few days ago with the webcam feed shown below:

Note that there is no one around in the picture above and it is 830ish in the evening -- and I am dead on the floor a'la Jesus Christ. Can you imagine the ripple of fear shimmering across my comrade's hearts in Mission Support? Funding cuts to the Mars Society, U.S. space exploration stifled -- an endless cascade of catastrophes because a student drops dead in the form of Jesus Christ on the floor of a simulated Martian habitat.

So why was I impersonating The Holy Carpenter Himself? Actually I wasn't -- I was doing a Yoga stretch for my back. My thought process was: there's no one around, so I've finally got some floor space to stretch out my back. And it felt damn good.

Furthermore, to add insanity to anxiety, the webcam updates about once every few minutes so Mission Support was left lingering for a terrifying three minutes that probably felt like three years, thinking I was lying on the floor unconscious without anyone to help me -- and all along, I was enjoying the self-indulging stretch of my back on international TV.

So what can Reality TV learn from all of this? Well, like Obi-Wan said to Luke: "you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view" -- webcam or not.

Jason Sherwin, PAO
MDRS Crew 47