Yep, can’t think of something good to put here this week. It stinks when your life is going in a perfectly reasonable direction, at a reasonable speed. Nothing fun to talk about.
And it’s not the kind of “nothing to talk about” that comes from nothing remarkable happening, and your life is painted all in grays and beige. It’s just…I guess nothing I did this week feels worth celebrating. That’s probably because, in the past few months, I’ve made some relatively major adjustments, and this week, I didn’t make major adjustments. So compared to a few months ago, I’m doing great. Compared to last week, it’s status quo. A different status quo, but still, short term vision sees nothing new.
I have an idea for a video series. It’ll require me to write a script, learn basic video editing, and put it all together, which doesn’t sound difficult, but learning new things is never super easy. It’s based on something that I’ve done casually for people in the past: lowering the pretentiometer. For those who are new to the concept of this made-up word, the pretentiometer (a device that measures pretentiousness) is a scale from 0 to 10 that indicates how far up their own ass a person is. This is usually in regards to art, but it can also apply to anyone knowledgeable in a field. Some good examples of high pretentiometer readings are: a 12 foot photograph of a green screen, woven balls of yarn with a note describing the artist as “a painter, and yarn is my paint”, and a Star Trek fan insisting that the bat’leth fight from Sons of Mogh isn’t actually in keeping with the established lore because the warriors didn’t properly acknowledge each other, thus staining the memory of Kahless. Basically, if you’re talking to someone, and they tune out halfway through, you’ve got a high number.
So my idea is to bring topics that are easy to have a high number, and lower it to a more broad audience. This is different from the phenomenon of “explain it like I’m five”, which often over-simplifies things. For example, you don’t necessarily need to explain what superheroes are to someone, but you might need to help them understand why Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl are the best thing to happen to comic books in decades.
I don’t know which topics I’m going to cover, or how in depth, or how broad or specific the topics will be. It’s still just a plan for now, but I think it’s got legs.
Song of the Week: Toxic by 2WEI. A fairly recent trend for summer blockbuster movie trailers has been “take a pop song, or otherwise recognizable song, with lyrics that are sort of relevant, and change the backing music to instead be as stereotypically bombastic as possible”. This is by no means the only song like this, or even the only artist working in this area. Whereas Two Steps from Hell works across multiple genres, 2WEI has found their specialty. If you don’t know, the original is Britney Spears, and this is very much not like her rendition. Also, I might post another song originally by Britney Spears next week. In fact, I might make it a mini theme for a few weeks.
That's Pretty NEET 