Kinetic (Saturdays): [dot dot dot]ting a troll

On the heels of the bananacakes WSJ business about too much darkness in modern YA literature and its subsequent fallout in the YA community and beyond, it seems like an apropos time to trot out this little gem of a kinetic typography video. Not because it's about darkness or YA literature, but because it so cleverly converses with culture of internet comments.

Happily, all of what I read regarding the WSJ article was considered and well-written – although I will admit that I consciously ignored most of the in-site comments to any of the articles in question, so I am sure my view has some skew. All the same, the vehemence with which the internet rose up in response to this issue is a good reminder (for those of us who might forget) of the sheer number of individuals out there in the world. AND THEY ALL HAVE OPINIONS.

Some are more reasonable than others.

Some, conversely, are so unreasonable that they fall in the "I couldn't make this up if I tried" category. And we creative types have field days with those.

This video falls under the second category. The author of this text, a dear soul going by the moniker Axman13, took umbrage with pretty much every aspect of a Newgrounds game called Super PSTW Action RPG, and in 2010 brought his complaints to the comment boards. What resulted was so heinously, patently bad that one of the voice actors for the game dramatized the rant, and a designer added the kinetic typography text. And the rant became golden.

So this immediately makes me think of two things.

First is the Stephen Fry speech which I posted for the inaugural Kinetic Thursday, in which he rallies against verbal snobbery, chides those "semi-educated losers" who go around sharpieing missing apostrophes onto signs and writing letters to grocery stores about "less" and "fewer," shakes his head at the idea that all that haughtiness is done for the sake of clarity. This last argument, Fry claims, "almost never holds water."

"I think," he continues, "what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of NOT CARING that underlies it." And yet, Axman13 (and all the commenters to WSJ kershnuffle) obviously cares. He obviously cares. Cares beyond the point of "right" or "wrong" language. And his point is made! I might wince and sigh and judge at all the "resons" and "pepoles" and "blaaaaaaaam!s" used, but I still get what he means.

Proper language is wonderful, and often necessary for many kinds of clarity, but Not. Always. Communication is much more forgiving than we usage sticklers and spelling queens would like to admit.

The second thing I think of is how integrative our contemporary creative culture is, and how lucky we are for it. Just as Axman13 gave an actor and a designer the opportunity to create something bigger than the component parts on hand, the WSJ article kicked a snowball downhill that gave tens of dozens of authors a fantastic platform from which to make thoughtful, useful counterpoints. It gave a forum for tweeters – readers, writers, publishing industry folk, librarians, teens and former teens – to weave into visibility a previously invisible web of what YA literature means (#YAsaves, in particular). It created a fascinating, mostly supportive intellectual and academic dialogue in a very immediate and very public sphere.

And if that isn't what communication is really about…

Anyway, Axman13 "liked" the video.

Maybe Gurdon will end up "liking" the dialogue her odd editorial engendered, too.

Kinetic Thursdays (er, Fridays): Weak and Weary

...of grading, that is.

I have determined that there should be a contract in undergrad courses that your final paper will not be graded if you attend less than 90% of the lectures. It's unbearable that the professor (or GTF) should have to do the work grading the paper of a student who won't do the work to show up to class.

*glares at un-dwindling pile of essays on her floor*

So, that mood established, let's go old-school with this week's kinetic typography video*:

The Raven Typography Animation from Matthew Popay on Vimeo.

Lovely.

Now someone bring me wine for the rest of these dang essays.

*(for an intro to this new thing I am trying to institute, go here)

Kinetic Thursdays: Terence McKenna - Reclaim Your Mind

So I am trying to give myself a weekly thing to do (that isn't RTW, fulfilling as participating in that is), and am doing so in the form of kinetic typography videos that have some bearing on reading, writing, publishing, creative thought, or just things that flat out inspire.

Bookshelves of doom posted one (well, a more pictorial than verbal one) on Wednesday, a stick figure illustration of a Read it and Weep/Smart Bitches discussion of the romance genre elements of Twilight. I'm going to go in for something a little more philosophical today, with Terence McKenna's call to arms to CREATE rather than CONSUME.

Which is what we writers do on a daily basis: create create create.

On the other hand, we also (especially in YA, I think) aim to READ the world, and to contain it and portray it and embellish and embrace and display it in the stories we create. There is a fine line in this strain of judgment, as people who move from consumer to creator end up BECOMING, to a degree, the very kinds of cultural engineers that McKenna rallies against.

Because that is the other thing we writers do: we strive to shape the world, and get others to come along for the ride.

(Warning: some NSFW language within.)

Terence McKenna - Reclaim your mind from Olivier Ferland on Vimeo.

I'm not claiming any one view is more valid than another, but I think it is a really fascinating debate to consider – where does creativity aim, if consumption is the enemy?

Thoughts?

Kinetic Thursdays: A beginning

So kinetic typography is a thing I am kind of obsessed with. As such, I've decided to make them a regular focus on Thursdays. I'll be starting with videos others have made, hopefully that have something to do with writing and language and reading, but the plan is to eventually move into making my own kinetic typography videos, based on YA/MG lit, the publishing industry, querying, agent advice, author/blogger/writer interviews, etc.

We'll see if I can pull it off.

In the meantime, let's start with this one: Stephen Fry, on pedants and language. Apt for me at this moment in my life, when grading and judging students' written language skills is one of my top priorities, right there alongside inventing language for my own purposes in my personal writing projects. Pedantry is good thing to rally against, all things considering, and this is a lovely example of kinetic typography at the same time.

Enjoy!

Quantum mechanical magic

Yes, I'm avoiding a particularly tricky bit of thesising doing this. Yes, it's totally irresponsible. But I found this little animated video of an astrophysics lunch discussion on PHDcomics, and I wanted to share:

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

So first, I love astrophysics and space and dark matter, and that is totally a direction I would take in life if I had to do my education over again. And if I didn't care about words as much as I do.

But! This is also interesting to think about IN TERMS OF writing: as writers, we spend so much time digging into the details of the details of the details of our stories, thinking that that is obviously where the heart will be, but, as the guys talking say, we really have no idea! It's by digging into the details of the details that we can get to QUESTIONS, not answers, questions that illuminate "a huge fraction of the Universe that no one's ever looked at before."

People. Our stories are exactly this. Parts of the Universe that no one's ever looked at before. We are explorers of endless frontiers, and knowing just how little we know is the best possible thing to propel us.

They, uh, go into a cool illustration of particle colliders next, and while I could extend my analysis to compare particle colliders to writing brains, I think that might be a little much.

But, what they end with is, "What should take away from all this is, we don't know what the rest of the elephant looks like… And you should be ready for some surprises."

And isn't that what all of our writing is, at the end of the day? Surprises. Not an elephant's tail. (Although…)

So any surprises for you guys lately? Mine continues to be the sudden contemporary project that popped into my head from that David Wax Museum song last week. It's been going gangbusters, and I just love it. Also, my MG stumbled into this really clever allusion/play on folklore that, even though *I* was the one who set it all up, I didn't see coming until it was on the page.

And. Back to find the elephant's tail of my thesis.