Tag Archive for 'artistic overanalysis'

This is Not Content; This is a Blog Post

This is not content; this is a blog post.

You are not consuming this blog post. It is not being depleted by you so that it will never be available to anyone ever again. Instead, perhaps you are reading it on a large computer screen. Perhaps you’re reading it on a laptop, large or small, sitting on a desk or in your lap. Perhaps you’re reading it on the screen of a tablet computer, or on the small screen of a cellphone. Perhaps it’s been printed out onto paper, maybe a plain letter sheet, or onto the glossy pages of a magazine, and you’re reading it off that. Perhaps you’re reading it aloud to a group of people, or perhaps you’re in that group of people, having it read aloud to you. But whatever you’re doing as these words enter your brain, you’re most certainly not consuming any content.

There is no such thing as content. There is no content industry full of content creators who create consumable content for content consumers. Instead, there is a diverse field of people, young and old, amateur and professional, communicating and manifesting ideas and information using a wide variety of methods and techniques. The end products of these efforts may be in the form of text, imagery, sound, or interactive experience, but none can be categorized as a generic, consumable commodity known as “content.”

If you are an artist, you are not a content creator. Perhaps you’re a painter, a musician, a filmmaker, a novelist, a comedian, a dramatist, a playwright, a game designer, a sculptor, a photographer, an animator, a puppeteer, a poet, or perhaps you’re a combination of all these things and more, but you do not create content. You make art.

If you are a journalist, you are not a content creator. You may report your stories through written words, through spoken words, through pictures, through video footage, through motion graphics, or a fusion of all these media, but you do not create content. You do journalism.

If you are an entertainer, you are not a content creator. You may entertain by telling a story, by doing a dance, by making people laugh, or by recording your conversations with fascinating people, but whether you broadcast this entertaining act with pictures, sound, or anything else, you do not create content. You do entertainment.

If you are an educator, you are not a content creator. You may write informative articles for an encyclopedia, deliver an enlightening speech to an eager audience, or create a presentation with charts and graphics, but however it is that you communicate your knowledge, you do not create content. You teach lessons.

All of these things are expressions of human thought, and yet rather than respecting their nuances, their diversity, and their individual importance, we marginalize them with our language, relegating all of what makes us unique as human beings to the generic, soulless, meaningless, newspeak descriptor of “content,” and their authors to a status of “content creators”. Yet, we do not refer to architects, carpenters, industrial designers, and the forces of nature themselves as “object creators”, and rarely, if ever, do we collectively refer to the results of their efforts as “objects”.

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.

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To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to This is Not Content; This is a Blog Post.
This work is published from: United States.

    Google’s Scribe Autocomplete Technology Is Very Late For First Day Of My Life Lyrics by The Beatles


    Google just released a new experimental app called Google Scribe, which brings the autocompletion technology that powers Google Suggest to writing anything at all. Anything that can be typed into a text box in your browser. Including blog posts.

    I decided to give it a try, and I’ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I’ll bet your life on the road today and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients. The experience is as exhilarating and possibly confusing as a first step in the right direction for them to become more involved in their children can vary greatly due to company policy and procedures for their use. Unfortunately, it’s all about themselves and their families in their homes and their lives are nothing.

    The problem is that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them all. Google Scribe of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research: Online Press Releases and Newsletters fast and elegant 3D photo gallery on their website and buy this product again and again and I’ma let you finish. There are no comments for this user yet and can not believe that there is anything… I’ma get you something to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them.

    To be fair, there are not any posts in the last few years and I have been able to find anything in these search results from RT on your Google searches by subscribing to the feed via email to state their case and their ownership of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books. I’m sure that some people might believe that they are not therefore to be understood that these embodiments are provided solely by this site are property of their respective owners, but with their own unique style of musical composition and performance of their duties and responsibilities of their jobs and their proportion against the total number of page views delivered based on the seller and the listing broker as an agent of the present invention is to provide and maintain their own calendars and schedules for their employees.

    There is a certain element of surrealism to the results, and you can not print this page this way, they can become and to remain in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached. It’s almost as if Andre Breton had anything to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them. Google Scribe is a haunting look into the digital psyche of the American Chemical Society and American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Pain Society Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved • Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

    As an actual writing aid, though, I don’t find it very useful.

      Stuff Is Too Complicated; Case In Point: Music Theory

      It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.

      Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.

      Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.

      So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).

      It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.

      So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?

      Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.

      So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.

      You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.

      I mean, like, duh.

      Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.

      My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:

      It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.

      Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.

      Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.

        How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture

        WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

        Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

        There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

        Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

        Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Hit the jump for why:
        Continue reading ‘How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture’

          Realization: Hideo Kojima is Video Gaming’s Béla Tarr, Except Not Talented

          I didn't intentionally position Tarr so he was looking at Kojima all like, "You think I'm this fucking guy?" But it worked out pretty well.

          Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

          Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:
          Continue reading ‘Realization: Hideo Kojima is Video Gaming’s Béla Tarr, Except Not Talented’