Finally watched a Dr Who episode. Seriously, hadn’t seen more than a clip or three before. Full thoughts will come in episode 19 of the Implausipod.
An odd episode: it felt like a speedrun through the required story beats to link everything together, and a lot of the rest was elided. So I’m not sure it was a representative story of the franchise; we got equal parts “very special episode” and “fanservice”, and while I was able to make some external connections early (and by the midpoint too), by the end it was all internally referential, and the titular Star Beast was a very thin foil for the rest of the internal narrative that the showrunner wanted to hang over the episode.
As a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced to stick around. Let’s see how the next one goes…
After the monthly WordPress Meet-up group (which I highly recommend if one is in your area; well worth it!), one of the members issued a challenge to post daily for a month.
Part of this was to get into the habit of doing it, of getting it done, and partly to learn more about WordPress through the repeated exposure to it.
So I said, sure, I’ll join you.
And as with anything, even if the best time to start was 5 years ago, the second best time to start is right now. There’s no sense in waiting to make a positive change, to put something off until New Years or whatever.
So let’s get started. 30 days of posting, starting right now.
There’s a post that pops up on occasion on Mastodon or the other socials from time to time, where an artist or creator chafes at their work being labelled as ‘content’.
And while I can sympathize, I hate to break it to them, but the genie is out of the bottle.
It’s all content.
It has been since the late 1900s.
I was reading Jenkins et. al. (2018) recently while prepping Episode 16 of the Implausipod, and even there “content” was being referenced.
So for future reference, let’s cover off why ‘content’ is fine.
Imagine, you have a pizza shop. You make some fantastic pizza. Best in town. Maybe as a customer I’m feeling like a pizza, maybe deep dish, maybe thin crust, maybe even a calzone. I’m not being picky.
But sometimes I’m feeling like a steak, or a stir fry, or a pho, or a Reuben, or breadsticks, or whatever. (Clearly I need to stop writing this before dinner).
And maybe, just maybe, I want to make something myself. At home, or on a campfire in the mountains (or whatever).
Regardless of what I’m having, we can all agree that we’re talking about food.
So too with content: it doesn’t matter if it’s a video or a blog post or a podcast or a digital comic, or even traditional art. It’s a bit of a mouthful to spell it all out, listing each and every type. Especially if we’re really interested in talking about food (sorry, content) in general.
And if someone objects, and says “I don’t make food, I make pizza!“, well, you go, you do you. But it comes across as weird to deny that what you’re making counts as food too.
So, yeah, let’s not do that. We used to call it “media”, and while that still holds true, in the 21st century we refer to it as “content” too.
Quick bit of Implausipod news, as it is now up and available on Apple Podcasts, which means it should be propagating to the apps that use that as well. So, great news! Hope that makes the episodes more accessible for a wider audience.
(It turns out that Taylor Swift was right, and “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” At least to a little extent. Apple had a bit to do with it too, as the Apple Podcasts is not accessible without an iTunes account (basically). So my reticence to use their products was a hard stop, with no workaround. Called their tech support on it too. Fixed now though.)
/2 Been thinking about this all night, how most of my examples would come from some basic and banal films.
And I think that’s the beauty of it, is that they’re all #art
The underlying assumption in responses to the thread is that “art” is defined by something that must be transcendent or sublime, a singular work that stands above others is somehow “art” in ways that the others are not.
Now some films might push this a little bit. If I’m Dan Harmon, I might have issues with #NowYouSeeMe f’rex, and struggle to find the art there, but this is where the subjective alights within #cinema
(Waitasecond, can I still use #frex , or did some tool decide to use it as the label for an AI-generated thesaurus for your smartphone in the last week?)
4/ Anyhoo, where was I? (phone call disrupted the tenuously connected synapses there…)
Oh yeah, there’s beauty in the basics, which is really what I was getting at.
Art can make you feel the little things too, is what I’m getting at.
Which is where I’m sitting at. So I’m thinking I’ll list out the films, and the frames, that strike me as “art”, however it gets (subjectively) defined, and I’ll run through the list here in the next few days.
