T w e n t y S i d e d
This is cool: My little YouTube movie was mentioned in TheyNow, an unofficial They Might Be Giants audioblog.
(As an aside, What is that little embedded audio player? It doesn’t seem to be branded. It’s a very small and low-profile player, which might make it the sort of thing Fledge was looking for a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure. I can’t tell where the audio is hosted, which is the key question here.)
Anyway, in the podcast Bryan talks about me using a TMBG song for my little movie. The song I used in this case was “Older”, and the version I used was off of their Mink Car album. He speculates that I chose the song at random. Sadly, the real reason I chose that song was even less interesting: I chose the song because it was the shortest of all of the TMBG I had on my computer. The cut of Older that I used was almost exactly two minutes, which was about how long my movie was. That was the only reason I chose it in the first place. It was only after I dropped it into place that I realized how perfect it was: Each section of the song fit nicely over a segment of the movie, and the most exciting part of the song lined up really well with the action part of the movie, which is where the rollercoaster runs everyone over. Those booming hits of percussion turned out to be ideal cues for the cuts I wanted to make.
I enjoyed making the movie, and a lot of people on YouTube have subscribed to me in hopes that I’ll put up another, but I honestly doubt I can do that again. It was the result of serendipity as much as creativity.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
I’ve put together a number of videos over the years, from AMVs to wedding videos of friends, to corporate event stuffs.
One thing I’m always surprised by is after putting clips in some chronological order, figuring out about how long the video will be, and choosing some piece of music — certain things just seem to fall in to place. Transitions fall naturally on beats, the tempo of the music seems to match up to what’s on screen. It’s very surprising how very often it happens.
Personally I wonder if it’s not so much that the two pieces fit together so natually, than our minds just sieze on what patterns and correlations *might* be there, and create some kind of meaning and order where it can…
That is a very interesting observation. I guess I won’t know for sure unless I make some more movies. :)
I have an account at FF.net (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/408079/), with readers subscribing to get story updates and “author” updates. It’s the same system that Youtube has, basically, only it was in operation for years.
I noticed that indeed about half of those readers who bother to subscribe _to stories_, do it out of expectation of updates, even when it’s should be very clear that no updates are forthcoming. Some would even ask for updates explicitly. I don’t know what that means. They aren’t blithering morons at all. It must an ingrained expectation that any success must be milked until dry. Good lord, I can understand now why Inuyasha is as long and dumb as it is. And I appreciate any anime which actually ends even more than before.
The other half thinks of story subscriptions as votes. FF.net limits the number of entries on favourites lists to 99 or 100 (I don’t remember exactly), so this is one way to work around it.
Author subscriptions have a similar breakdown, I suspect, but it’s not quite as obvious, there’s a lot of overlap in reasoning, etc. They are exact equivalent of what YouTube has though. The difference from story subscription is, there’s always a chance that author would do something else. So it actually makes sense to subscribe in order to receive a notification.
BTW, Shamus. Way to go with the novel. I could never bring myself to work on a large-scope title.
BTW, Shamus. Way to go with the novel. I could never bring myself to work on a large-scope title.
Thanks Pete.
Very interesting notes on subscriptions. I’ll bet you’re exactly right.