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Private Notes
Clickbait title: The Hot New Comment Responses Everyone Is Talking About
Suicide Squad season has come and gone, but the crisp winter air reminds us of its icy grip on our collective cultural urethra. Part of me wants to move on, hunker down for winter and embrace spring, but another part knows it's going to be cold forever and maybe I should just spend the rest of forever dissecting caped hero and video game movies.
Clickbait title: This One Weird Trick Is The Reason Movies Even Work
There's something cathartic about drilling all the way down to the fundamentals. Not just the basic techniques, but the actual fundamentals, the bedrock of how something even functions in the first place, the reason why a series of edits can be used to tell a story rather than simply turning into abstract mush. It's also surprisingly challenging, like explaining what hands are.
Clickbait title: Nazis hate him! Secrets of propaganda exposed!
This took far longer to put together than I'd anticipated. It wasn't even the work itself, it's the emotional load. I eventually had to start chopping out huge planned segments, like looking at modern propaganda like that awful "Surfing in the DPRK" white guy rap video. I'm sorry about the downer ending, but there's no way to spruce it up. To a certain degree we lost.
You should seriously read, and then re-read, Umberto Eco's'Ur-Fascism'. It's available online for free. It's not that long. Here, I'll even link it for you. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Clickbait title: This video will restore your faith in the entombed god Dormin
Shadow of the Colossus is a rare masterpiece of a game. The occasional janky controls and wonky physics aside, every element of this game holds up incredibly well. More than that, it's about the overall package just coming together in a cohesive and synergistic way, the mechanics of the game complimenting and reenforcing the themes and story. Probably the biggest reason we haven't seen a repeat is because it's less about a boss rush where you climb all over big monsters and more about the total package, and getting it right. Though it is also about the boss rush. The technological side of SotC is still daunting, and I'm sure plenty of game developers out there re-play it and go "wait, how did they do that?" Last word: the beginning of the fight with Avion, when Wander transfers from the ground to Avion's wing, is one of the purest moments in video game history.
Clickbait title: This editor describes basic vocabulary and you won't believe what happens next!
Filmmakers are actually really awful when it comes to vocabulary, re-using words randomly, basically describing anything with whatever word feels right at the time. A gobo is a cucalorus, also called a cookie, that has a focusing mechanism, but a gobo is also a kind of motor, and that motor might be attached to a gobo, or it might be attached to the fixture itself, and by the transitive properties of metonyms you end up with a gobo gobo with a gobo on its gobo. I've seen 'parallel cut' used at least three different ways in various textbooks and glossaries. This isn't me claiming that I've got the definitive take on all of these terms, just that, you know, if you heard a term used a different way to describe a different thing chances are you're right, you have and you did, because it's a mess and we're all faking it.
Clickbait title: hack writers hate him! One weird trick to improving your screenplays!
My friend Lindsay recently did a video on this subject looking at Mad Max: Fury Road talking about this same subject (though she uses the term 'planting and payoff'; both are equally valid, though I'll admit that 'planting and payoff' has a wonderful alliterative quality to it versus 'setup and payoff') and I'll admit that I was a bit chapped, like I'd been beaten to the punch on a great idea. But that's the thing: not only was it a great idea it was also an obvious one. Anyone with a trained eye came away from Fury Road blown away by the almost perfect efficiency of the story in managing the establishment and use of every single prop, from the guns planted around the war rig to the steering wheel to the bolt cutters to the boot and the blood and the bullets. It's a really good video and you should go watch it, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLLGN7zv-3k
Clickbait title: Get Paid 60k Per Year With This One Online Trick!
Blip.tv also positioned itself as "just pals" but that idea of "we'll let the users guide our growth" was a paper mask hiding a lack of core vision. They would make a lot of promises and did a lot of posturing vis a vis supporting creators and helping them develop content, but in the end Blip's business model was "get bought by someone bigger." That kind of worked out for them as they were bought by Maker Studios who were, themselves, in the business of getting themselves bought by someone bigger. So Maker buys Blip so Disney will buy Maker, opens Maker.tv as a hypothetical curated database clone-and-re-skin of Blip, but closes the whole thing within 18 months without ever actually re-launching the Blip creators they went out of their way to retain in the merger. As it turned out they had no real interest in developing content when they could just skim ad revenue off the 50,000 channels that fell below payment thresholds, and withhold payment en masse in order to milk the interest on the payroll account.
Clickbait Title: Warning Don't Use Dialectic Analysis Before You See This
While meta-discussion of YouTube is hardly lacking, I think there's a lot of room for more serious analysis of YouTube as a broad subject and all the myriad subcultures in specific. Every time I've attended VidCon I've been as surprised by the subcultures that are represented as I have by the ones that are absent. I think it would be utterly fascinating to see an ASMR panel at VidCon 2018, to hear a bunch of ASMR creators talk shop about the specific nuances of their genre, the common needs and wants of their audience, what makes a successful channel, and how the genre is evolving. The other day I saw a five hour long, multi-part ASMR choose your own adventure. you always think you have a handle on what's out there, until you realize you really don't.
Clickbait Title: You've Never Seen Barthes and Saussure Like THIS Before
I thought to myself "hey, this one's going to be a snap, you can just shoot it once and be done, you'll crank this out so fast!" and then I went and cooked up a whole bunch of intricate gags and cuts and segments that required multiple setups and/or doing things in a style that I've never done before, one of which involved driving to a riverside park half way across the city b/c I really dig the bridge. Miraculously I only suffered a couple bug bites while I was wandering around down there, and all of them have, at this point, stopped itching. The absolutely manic delivery of that bit at the end isn't entirely intentional, it's just what felt right.
Clickbait Title: this happened to me ~~pseudo-intellectual nonsense~~ STORYTIME #SocialExperiment
When I teased this video the initial reaction was a near-unanimous slow-motion "oh no," like a comedy action hero leaping on a grenade that's revealed to be a dud or a prop or it was actually just a bagel. I'm not saying this looks like a grenade, but is really just a bagel, but I am saying that I find the tepid anti-intellectualism that has become calcified in video game circles to be exhausting. It's reached a point where so many intelligent, engaged people are on the brink of giving up entirely because any attempt to improve the language we use to talk about games as they exist and operate is met with suspicion and mockery, painted as little more than bloviating wankery, and trotted around like Quasimodo as a target for rotten turnips. Ludonarrative dissonance has earned a reputation not through any irreparable flaws in the concept, but because pundits catering to an anti-intellectual base coined stupid names like "ludonarrative disco biscuits" because pretending big words are hard is a sure way to get a laugh from the worst kinds of people.
Clickbait title: Watch These Hot Games Intentionally Misbehave
The cough hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's worse now. I had to stop and hack a good, rumbling cough for a solid few seconds every other line. I wouldn't be surprised if
Clickbait Title: Video Criticism YouTube Exploitation Meta Commentary Pregnant Algorithm Educational Spam Fidget Spinner Buried Alive For Kids
Very late in the process of making this I decided to change the name, largely because the moment I made the original title "YouTube and the Business of Exploiting Children" public in a promotional Tweet I realized that there was an entire constellation of related issues that I wanted to talk about. From channels that exist to get kids hooked on gambling to parents subjecting their children to abusive conditions as "pranks", there's a lot of shady stuff going on. In that context, weird spam and unsettling videos about poop didn't rank high enough to warrant burning a title that good.
Clickbait title: 7 Reasons The Book of Henry FAILS
The Book of Henry is pretty close to an ideal awful movie. There's dimensions to watching the film that I can't convey fully in a condensed video, like how stop-start the plots are, how Henry gets sick and the movie basically stops what it was doing for twenty minutes waiting for him to die, and how watching the film is to go through a rolling process of trying to figure out what the film is trying to actually tell you. People who are familiar with Jurassic World should catch the similar ways that Book of Henry demonizes a woman for not behaving exactly and precisely as the mother figure that the filmmakers think she should be. Susan gets off light, though, since she isn't executed by dinosaur for the crime of texting.
